CommentsDEEGAN ON LA-The Dodgers have regained their reputation as winners, despite that reputation having been shredded in two recent World Series.
Now we know, as divulged by the Major League Baseball Commissioner, that the Houston Astros and the Boston Red Sox, cheated their way to World Series victories.
Our “Boys in Blue” are back where they belong as the champions that we know they are, a fact reinforced by a baseball scandal as bad, or even worse, than the “Shoeless Joe Jackson--Black Sox” baseball scandal of 1919, when his team (actually the Chicago White Sox) worked together to fix the World Series. That was seventy-three years after the first officially recorded baseball game, which is said to have been when the New York Nine defeated the New York Knickerbockers 23-1 in four innings on June 19, 1846.
Finally! Something to unify LA and get the collective mind off politics, housing shortages, and the twin homeless and public health crises that have been such intractable headline issues for so long.
What timing at the start of the baseball season, as pitchers and catchers reporting to spring training camps, and with the first games of the spring exhibition season just weeks away.
Kids just getting an awareness of baseball, as they slot into the continuum of fandom that has kept baseball alive for 174 years, are getting an unfortunate initiation into the crooked life showcased by the greed of two teams (the Houston Astros and the Boston Red Sox) that would do anything necessary, up to and including cheating, to win the World Series in 2017 and 2018.
In both years, the Astros’ and Sox’ “sign stealing” gave them an unfair advantage that they used to beat the Dodgers in World Series games.
The post-traumatic stress disorder for kids may be worse than getting bad grades on an exam and facing a parent's disappointment. Some of the baseball players that should be their role models and heroes have retroactively failed their final exam now that the covers have been pulled back on how they got their A+ grades as World Champions in two recent seasons.
It's a tough time to be a kid getting shaped into a public life that includes an awareness of baseball and also politics. It may take some time for these kids to process though the twin impressions of a baseball scandal and a presidential impeachment. The former has happened at this level only twice in 174 years, while the impeachment of a president is only the third time this has happened in the country’s history. Five scandals over two centuries may turn anyone's head. For the kids of 2020, they got what baseball would call a “twin killing” of a baseball scandal and a presidential impeachment happening simultaneously.
The big scar to LA is that former Dodger Alex Cora (1998-2004) was, allegedly, one of the masterminds behind the sign-stealing scandal. Unless he is acquitted he will always be an asterisk in the Dodgers history that kids learn, just as the stain of a presidential impeachment is permanent and will forever be presented in history books. Cora’s immediate penalty was to be fired as manager of the Boston Red Sox where he led the team to a 2018 World Series when the Dodgers were defeated in rigged games at Boston, just like they had been the year before in rigged games in Houston.
Two other MLB team managers (from the Astros and the Mets) were fired as was the general manager of the Astros.
Generations of Americans have grown up to know baseball as “America's sport” in the past 175 years. That iconic stature has been steadily eroded by the pre-eminence of basketball not only at home but globally. The NBA is one of the great cultural exports of the US.
Baseball, in a hyperactive landscape of choices to divert us, is too slow moving a game to build an emergent fan base of young kids that will be hooked for life on baseball. It's hard to complete with the speed of video games or basketball for attention. It's hard enough to create a fan, or a political election voter, without the added stigma of scandal.
Satisfaction from following your team, and the integrity of the game that is taken for granted, are the rewards of being a fan. This is what may be robbed from kids just entering baseball fandom: the purity of the game and the fairness of the competition.
So, to offset the bad news for baseball is that the Dodgers are just as great as their fans always believed they were. Once the season gets going, kids may hopefully get more involved in the stats and performances of their favorite player and feel the scandal only in the background, where it will become part of the permanent record of baseball.
The leisurely pace and arcane statistics of a baseball game are a great way to get our minds off the chaotic world we live in until we, like the kids, are robbed of the pleasure.
(Tim Deegan is a civic activist whose DEEGAN ON LA weekly column about city planning, new urbanism, the environment, and the homeless appear in CityWatch. Tim can be reached at [email protected].)
-cw
