So now that the Mitchell Report has come out and several cynics are saying “I told you so,” up and down the street, I have to tell you, dear reader, for me – it’s a shock as big as Watergate.  “C’mon you can’t be that naïve!” I hear my more world-weary friends exclaim; “Didn’t you expect it?  Didn’t you grow up in a post-Vietnam era?”  I suppose all of that is true, but for me, a child of the 1980s – innocence and glamour has always equated baseball.

True, I grew up amid the strike split season of 1981, but I also grew up with the powerful lure of the Dodgers-Yankees rivalry of the 70s, the Big Red Machine of Ohio, the tragic endings of J.R. Richards and Thurman Munson, and let’s not forget, the amazing Kirk Gibson homerun.  Oh, my love affair with baseball has waxed and waned, sandwiched in-between college studies and college sweethearts.  Yet somehow, baseball has always spoken to me of possibilities – of dreams to come. 

Perhaps it stems from my father.  He took me to father-son night at my high school because a utility stringer from the Dodgers was there signing balls.  Not so unusual, unless you know that I'm female – cursed or blessed with a boy-like first name that got me on the “roster” so to speak.  I always wondered what that right fielder thought, but I knew what it meant.  With baseball, anything was possible; anything was achievable.

And yet there’s the Mitchell Report again.  Like everyone else, I haven’t read it.  Like everyone else, I know what it says.  Grown men who were our idols failed us.  Grown men who we respected succumbed to the lure of easy money and the doltish rationale of “everyone does it” and have – yes – cheated and tarnished the game. 

I have listened to the apologists who say that it’s just a game.  That these men are just trying to get ahead, like everyone else.  That they aren’t supposed to be role models.  That it’s just entertainment.  And that none of us can possibly understand the pressure.  They say the law doesn’t matter.  They say that ethics don’t matter.  And they say that everyone does it. 

In my America, everyone doesn’t.

In my America, the grass on the diamond is real; the players sign balls for kids and watch their language around them; the bases are ninety feet apart; and the players play hard, but not dirty.  A brush back pitch is fair, but drilling one to the head isn’t.  The game recognizes war and grief, earthquakes and terrorism, flag burnings and shattered dreams.  And none of these things hold it back.  In my America, none of us are saints, but we try not to be sinners.  And in my America, we know the difference.

So I’m packing away my beloved LoDuca bobble heads, discarding my treasured Gagne rally towel, and taking down the poster of Clemens that encouraged me by my computer to do my best every day.  I’m rounding up my father’s Barry Bonds collection, and packing that away too.  He passed away in 2002 and left me his collection, along with his belief in possibilities – despite 9/11, despite cancer, despite everything.  I hope he doesn’t have a copy of the Mitchell Report in heaven.

I want to write a letter to these young men – who are, after all, impossibly young and strong and vainglorious – and who did not mean to shatter our dreams, but only to fulfill their own.  And yet, what would I tell them?  Perhaps my disappointment is nothing to their own, and what may now befall them.  I think I would remind them of that old American epic by Ernest Thayer, one that he was not so fond of after all.  He wrote it as a humorous anecdote and complained that people took it too seriously.  I will tell Mr. Thayer that it’s not the poem people took seriously, but the game – that most American of pastimes – which has always offered hope, promise, opportunity, and bitter disappointment – sometimes all within one inning. 

I would say to them:

“Oh, somewhere in this favoured land the sun is shining bright,
The band is playing somewhere, and somewhere hearts are light;
And somewhere men are laughing, and somewhere children shout,
But there is no joy in Mudville – mighty Casey has struck out.”

Here’s hoping that baseball, and America, finds that “somewhere” this year during spring training. That "somewhere" where everything is possible, everything achievable. 

January 2008