Why are people so intent on changing or glamorizing the past?
I was thinking about this in view of all the hysteria about Roger Clemens and who did or did not use steroids over the past 30 something years and why that is horrible but Mickey, Willie and the Duke (and almost everyone else) using amphetamines is no biggie.
The answer, given by way too many baseball writers and talkers on sports radio, ex-baseball players and old guys, is that baseball was “pure” back in The Good Old Days. What on earth is PURE? How could any contest, played by young, aggressive males be PURE? And what on EARTH are “The Good Old Days?”
Answer -
well, personally, I think it is every person’s idea of the Garden of Eden. Yeah, regardless of religious beliefs, I think that people have this vision of the Real, the Ideal, how Things Were before the Debbil come along and messed things up. It certainly is not based on any sort of reality.
For example, take us females – well, not THAT way. Mennnnnnn. I keep hearing how females today work SOOOOOO much harder and are under SOOOOOO much more stress. Say WHAT????? They gotta be smoking something to say that – comparing myself to both of my grandmothers: I actually had a high school to go to, I had access to medical care and medicines, I didn’t have to get married when I was 14 or 15, I didn’t have to spend my adult life pregnant because I can choose whether or not to get pregnant because my husband doesn’t have the right to rape and impregnate me against my wishes, I don’t have to watch my children die from the terrible diseases that go around every winter, I don’t spend sunup to sundown with not so much as a day off for my entire life washing clothes by hand, making all the clothes by hand, cooking 3 meals a day for at least a dozen people, I don’t worry that we are going to starve if there is bad weather and the crops die – and I could go on. We’re fairly poor, but I live like a queen compared to my female ancestors of all colors and races.
As for baseball – I’m not sure exactly where people got the idea that Back Then, ballplayers were just sweet little innocent boys who played For The Love Of The Game and who Played The Game As The Game Should Be Played and it certainly wasn’t for money. Sure there were your Lou Gehrig goody 2 shoes mama’s boys. But most of the guys were a heck of a lot more like Ty Cobb and Mickey Mantle and Babe Ruth – not in talent, but in appetite for alcohol, fornicating and winning by whatever means they could. Somehow, the hidden ball trick, or holding a runner by his belt or throwing illegal spitballs, or Ellie Howard cutting the ball on his shin buckle before throwing it back to Whitey Ford, or all the boys popping illegal drugs before the game because hordes of wicked females had kidnapped them from their monks’ cells, forced alcohol down their unwilling throats then raped them all night making them too sick and tired to play, are all pushed aside.
(Note – as for me, I never bought into the picture of pure, unwilling, righteous, aggressive, vigorous, healthy, competitive young males being dragged off kicking and fighting, totally against their will by gangs of evil, vicious females intent on the destruction of the will, morals and sperm stores of these poor dear boys. Of course, I never bought into the picture of idyllic femalehood, in which females are pure, innocent, untouched by icky things like puberty or males, until they are 18 or 20 years old, then living the carefree life of ease while children magically appeared out of nowheres and took care of themselves while the household chores all did themselves and no one died or got sick or had troubles. So I’m a skeptic/realist and believe that people are people and always were…)
I’m not sure why so many sportswriters have these absurd fantasies about baseball players (as opposed to, say, football players or basketball players or golfers) but their obsession with unreality borders on not quite sane. I would say that any competitive person in any competitive event looks for whatever edge he/she can find. Or as Jim Bouton once explained – pitchers would use something that took ten years off their life if it gave them another 5 MPH on their fastball. Which sounds honest, and accurate, to me. Of course I know that some people go to the ridiculous extemes, like Rosie Ruiz, who didn’t even bother to run the marathon she (briefly) won, but those people quickly remove themselves from competition.
Anyway, I guess this is why I simply can’t seem to get myself all hot and bothered about baseball players (or maybe I should say ONLY baseball players named Barry Lamar Bonds and Roger Clemens and Mark McGwire) using steroids over the past 30 or so years, just as I can’t seem to get myself all hot and bothered by Mickey Mantle and his contemporaries using amphetamines, just as I can’t get myself all hot and bothered by Ty Cobb sliding in with spikes high, just as I can’t get hot and bothered by the 19th century players hiding another ball in the outfield grass or grabbing a runner by his belt. If you don’t like the way people do things, then change the rules and enforce them, don’t obsess that non-existant halcyon times were destroyed by men who want money (as if they didn’t want money and power Back Then) to play a child’s game.
But I’m not picking on sportswriters and old men and their faulty memories – really I’m not. Us females are just as bad. For some bizarre reason, most females really REALLY think that there really REALLY is this perfectly perfect in every way Prince Charming who will ride in and make their lives perfect too. Then of course, when they finally realize there is no such entity, they get angry, resentful and even bitter because they conveniently pretend that the phrase “for better or worse” in the marriage vows refers only to OTHER people. There never was any such perfect person and there is no such thing as a perfect life and there never was, ever.
But, I think baseball is foolishly idealized the way it is because it really is the game of life. And people seem to harbor this hope that life could be perfect, as it used to be, before the
Tags: Houston Astros, MLB
Lisa—Classic spitball moves:
Preacher Roe—Took advantage of umpires beginning to get conditioned toward looking for all the sneaky hiding places and sneaky substances and did the one thing they’d never have suspected: spit right into his glove after chewing up a wad of Beech-Nut gum. (Teammate Carl Furillo: When Preach touched the bill of his cap with two fingers, that was the signal, that’s when we knew he was coming. When he touched with one finger, we knew he was faking.)
Jim (Mudcat) Grant—Soaped up the inside of his uniform shirt close to where his pants waist would be. Got away with it until he oversoaped on his gray road uniform—and on a particularly hot day, the soap bubbled visibly above his belt.
Phil (The Vulture)Regan—He really did it with a natural substance: Regan was known to sweat heavily enough, so he just let the sweat run down his arm and into his hand.
Whitey Ford—Forget the buckleball, Whitey’s best tool was his wedding ring—it came up with a rasp in it and, as Ford once admitted, “I had my own tool bench out there.”
Lew Burdette—Mr. Fidget was a tobacco chewer and would spit the juice to the same spot next to the rubber . . . building himself a nice little mud puddle from which he could scoop when he bent down to adjust his spiked shoes.
Best crack about a spitballer: The anonymous scout who said of Don Sutton, “He’s set such a splendid example of defiance that one day I expect him to throw a ball up to the plate with bolts attached.”
Best crack about two spitballers facing each other: The anonymous scout who said, after Tommy John beat Don Sutton in a game, “If they can find one smooth ball from that game, they ought to send it to Cooperstown.”
—Jeff
Best crack by a spitballer: I don’t use foreign substances. Everything I use is from the good ol’ U.S. of A.—George Frazier, the last man to lose three games in one postseason series.
Lisa,
Amen. If baseball really mirrors the history of life in America, it’s not likely it does so selectively. Baseball reflects that which is good and noble in us as well as that which ain’t so pretty to look at or to remember.
If we reject the assertion that the past was better than today, the guys-have-always-done-it excuse doesn’t hold. Our expectations of today’s players must be higher now and even higher for the future as the sport continues to evolve toward the ideals that we maintain as a society.
Wow. I didn’t care about Clemens before, but now I’m in an intellectual tizzy!
OK, not really. Nice article tho.
I was watching a History channel show that said back in the 1800′s it was thought that cocaine was good for (and used by) baseball players…
Apparently since the beginings of baseball drugs have been a factor.
jeff
- i love your stories.
michael,
my mama always said – when it comes to men, you gotta take the good with the bad. of course, she always said it was she was mad at some male human, which is a whole lot of the time, but her point is a good one.
ALL men are just people. human beings with the good and the bad. no one is this holy creature without sin or fault. and actually, it is unfortunately part of our own sins that we have the gall to demand that these people be without sin. or, as this famous person once said – he/she who is without sin is the only one got the right to make that demand (ok, restated a little…)
baseball is the game of life, played by people, not stat cards. just as the rules set forth in leviticus have, uh, changed (ahem) over the years – we no longer kill someone for mixing fibers in fabrics, for example.
and in baseball, the players did all KINDS of things Back Then that are absolutely seriously nono these days. but i don’t see all these people who want to erase the stats of players who threw illegal pitches, who held players back by tripping them, holding them, etc… i mean, different teams could have won the WORLD SERIES!!!
the only reason for the absolute hysteria over steroids, best i can tell, is people think they disturb the stories/legends of The Pure Past, a time that never existed, except in the imagination.
james
i am shocked SHOCKED to find out that baseball players used to take drugs to play better Back Then when they were pure little angels.
but it is ok and they should not be vilified for taking cocaine because 100 years later we have all decided that it is not performance enhancing and we should only vilify players for trying to enhance performance if what they use works or seems to work for the stars.
so if it is really true that babe ruth used to eat sheep/pig/goat/horse/cow testicles for the testosterone in them to get stronger, it doesn’t matter because he just ate them and no other man fooled with his buttocks.
you understand.
we can’t have no man be touching some other man’s butt, uh, injecting stuff into some other man’s butt.
you see what i’m sayin
Lisa,
As I see it, the reason for the hysteria over steroids is the bipolar attitude in this country regarding drugs.
I did not watch the Clemens 60 Minutes interview as I was on the phone with a friend. But I asked my 11-year old son to count the drug commericals during the interview and to think about how interesting it is that we are constantly primed to take a pill for anything that ails us or to get some sort of edge or restore past potencies. Yet somehow people who are paid solely on their ability to perform tremendous feats of physical prowess are vilified beyond all proportion for doing the same.
Frankly, it’s absurd.
somebody as an ax to grind. jeez.
Lisa—Here’s a classic: Mike Flanagan once drew Thomas Boswell aside during spring training, produced a shiny new baseball, opened up a wire coat hanger, cut four straight gashes into the meat of the hide, held the ball up with the gashes up, and grinned. “Any time I need five new pitches, I got ‘em.”
Lou Piniella was the Yankee manager during the aforesaid Tommy John-Don Sutton game (Sutton was then with the Angels), and George Steinbrenner was watching the game from home, phoning the dugout and demanding Piniella have Sutton checked. Replied Sweet Lou: “George, if I have the umpires check Sutton the Angels’ll have them check TJ. Whatever they’re doing out there TJ’s doing it better. So let’s just let it be.”
Never forget, too, that wherever Billy Martin went, Art Fowler—old reliever, known spitballer—went as his pitching coach. Those who believe the spitter thrown properly can damage your elbow point to what happened to the entire Oakland starting rotation of the early 1980s after Martin and Fowler got finished with them—overworked as it was and arm or elbow trouble for the entire group (Mike Norris, Steve McCatty, Matt Keough in particular), all of whom were out of the majors within four or five seasons.
How one of Whitey Ford’s tricks ended up hurting Yogi Berra worse: Ford once used a kind of stickum to help (so he said) grip his curve ball better, and he kept it in a hollowed out roll-on deodorant tube. Berra at the time had a clubhouse reputation for mooching personal products, so Mickey Mantle decided to fix him—he switched Ford’s stickum tube for the usual tube of deodorant and Yogi took the bait. Two minutes later he went screaming into the trainer’s room—the stickum had glued his arms to his sides, and the trainer had to shave his sides and biceps to get him loose.
Thomas Boswell: “Some say nobody accused Cincinnati pitcher Bob Purkey of throwing a spitball until the day his catcher went out to warm him up wearing a bib.”
Lest we forget the hitters—even The Mighty Bambino wasn’t above a little subterfuge. One of his bats turned up in a traveling Louisville Slugger exhibit making the major league clubhouse rounds, and Dave Henderson—future Red Sox postseason hero but then with the Mariners—hefted a Ruth bat when he spotted a peculiar colouring in the end of the barrel. Henderson was no dope: “Hey, that’s a plug! This bat is corked!”
And don’t get me started on all the season-ending grooves pitchers might lob to hitters looking to fatten up their batting averages to finish a salary drive. Even Bobby Richardson, the Yankees’ Mr. Clean infielder, was supposed to get a gift on the final day of 1959—everyone on the Orioles was in on it (Richardson was well liked around the league).
Not to mention the gimme Denny McLain threw Mickey Mantle so Mantle could nail the bomb that put him past Jimmie Foxx on the all-time list: McLain had his 30th win pretty much in the bank when Mantle stepped in in the late innings and Tiger catcher Bill Freehan told Mantle to just tell them what he wanted: “Denny wants to see you get that one.” It took three pitches, but Mantle got what he wanted and sent it into the upper deck.
And thus it is that boys will be boys, always . . .