Barry Bonds

62 Home Runs? Meh

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Aaron Judge just finished a season for the ages. He came 4 hits shy of the Triple Crown and will almost certainly win the American League MVP award, deservedly so, as he practically single-handedly carried a New York Yankees team that cratered in the second half of the season to the division title.

But since he didn’t win the Triple Crown, his amazing season will be boiled down to the fact that he hit 62 home runs, breaking the Yankees and American League records.

That achievement is largely meaningless.

Wait, what?

Yes, 62 home runs is amazing. There have only been 6 seasons (by 3 players) where someone hit more than those 62 dingers. But based on the media coverage, you would think he’s personally saved baseball by erasing the tainted marks of the steroid era and establishing the “real” home run record.

It’s absurd.

I could find you any number of articles and videos of otherwise intelligent journalists and talking heads arguing that Judge has now set the “real” record. Roger Maris Jr. famously proclaimed Judge to be the real record holder, as if his familial link to the guy who held the record for 37 years makes him the arbiter of baseball’s single-season home run champion, and not someone who just realized he’s lost any reason to be invited to games for free as the representative of his father’s achievement. But it was really one column that made my blood boil and inspired me to sit down and put together this post.

On Tuesday, before Judge had hit his 62nd homer, Eric Blum of Deadspin wrote a column discussing what a disappointment it would be if Judge couldn’t hit the momentous home run, and proclaimed that should he finish the job it would be the “biggest single achievement in baseball in two decades”. A great achievement? Yes. The “biggest single achievement in baseball in two decades”? Not so fast my friend.

History Lesson Part 1

Babe Ruth set the single-season home run record 3 consecutive years from 1919-1921 before setting the seemingly insurmountable record of 60 in 1927. That record stood for 34 years until Roger Maris hit 61 in 1961. His record somehow lasted longer than Ruth’s, until Mark McGwire (70) and Sammy Sosa (66) broke it 37 years later in 1998. McGwire would add a season of 65 homers in 1999, and Sosa would hit 63 in 1999 and 64 in 2001 before Barry Bonds came along and hit 73 in 2001 to establish the current Major League record, which has now stood for 21 years.

By the way, how much did it have to suck for Sosa to have a four season stretch where he hit 66, 63, 50, and 64 home runs, and aside from a 45-minute span where he beat McGwire to 66 home runs in ’98, he never held the home run record?

Defending the Triple Crown

Hitting 60 home runs is hard – it’s only happened nine times in the history of baseball. Hell, hitting 50 home runs has only happened 47 times, so I’m not diminishing what Judge has done this season. But almost as rare as the 60 home run season is the batting Triple Crown, which has happened 12 times since baseball recognized RBI in 1920, and the most recent winner broke the longest Triple Crown drought in the game’s history – longer than any gap between home run records being established.

So it should come as no great surprise that a blog that makes no effort to hide its obvious Detroit bias would dedicate a post to defending Miguel Cabrera’s 2012 American League Triple Crown as the “biggest single achievement in baseball in two decades”.

(In actuality, I’m going to argue that his 2013 follow-up season was the more impressive feat.)

Cabrera became the first player in 45 years to win the Triple Crown in 2012, finishing with a .330 average, 44 home runs, and 139 RBI. What people who are not obsessive fans of the Detroit Tigers may not realize is that his 2013 season was perhaps more impressive.

History Lesson Part 2

There have been 12 Triple Crowns in the American and National Leagues since 1920 (a significant starting point since it heralded the end of the dead ball era and the official creation of the run batted in). There were 5 Triple Crown seasons in the AL, NL, and the old American Association prior to 1920, as well as 10 Triple Crown winners in the Negro Leagues. Of those 27 seasons, only one man – Josh Gibson in 1936 and 1937 – won the Triple Crown in back-to-back seasons.

(Because of the shorter seasons in the “official” Negro Leagues and the pre-1901 Major Leagues, and the deadened ball that required a significantly different style of play prior to 1920, I am not considering these 15 seasons on par with the AL/NL achievements and thus not including any analysis here. If you don’t like that…well, you do the work.)

Of those 12 AL/NL Triple Crown Seasons, 9 were followed up by seasons where the winner finished in the top 10 in the 3 categories the next season, and 10 were preceded by such seasons. To determine how close someone came to repeating as Triple Crown champion, I added their finish in the respective statistical categories to come up with a “Triple Crown rank”. For example, someone who finished first in average, second in home runs, and third in RBI would have a Triple Crown rank of 6. The lower the number the better, with a Triple Crown winner having a rank of 3.

The closest anyone has come to winning back-to-back Crowns was Jimmie Foxx in 1932 and 1933. Foxx missed out on the Triple Crown in 1932 by 2 hits, losing the batting title to Dale Alexander by just over 3 points while leading the league in homers and RBI, before winning the Crown in 1933. Worth noting is that Foxx played all 154 games in 1932, while Alexander missed 30 games and had 248 fewer plate appearances than Foxx did. Kinda feels like the real Jimmy Dugan got the shaft.

Rogers Hornsby led in average and RBI in 1921, but missed out on back-to-back Crowns by 2 home runs, which preceded him achieving the feat in 1922. But in both the Foxx and Hornsby cases, the near-miss on the Triple Crown preceded them finishing the job the following season.

Among players looking to repeat as Triple Crown champion, prior to 2012, only 3 seasons saw someone register a Triple Crown rank of 10 or lower:

  • In 1948, Ted Williams won the batting title, and finished 14 HR and 28 RBI behind the champions. Not particularly close.
  • Frank Robinson followed up his 1967 Triple Crown by finishing second in average (5 hits shy), fourth in homers (14 HR behind), and third in RBI (27 RBI short) in 1968. Again, not a significant threat to go back-to-back.
  • Williams should be considered the closest to repeating as Triple Crown champion, as he followed up his first Crown in 1942 by finishing second in each category, 6 hits, 6 home runs, and 4 RBI behind the champions. There’s a caveat to that though: Williams’s follow-up season came in 1946, as he spent 1943-45 serving in World War II.

Back to Miggy

After Cabrera won the first Triple Crown in 45 years in 2012, he arguably had a better season in 2013. He hit the same number of home runs, had 2 fewer RBI, and improving his slash line from .330/.393/.606/.999 to .348/.442/.636/1.078. He repeated as batting champion, and finished second in homers and RBI. But his chase to repeat could have ended much differently.

On August 26 of that season, Cabrera trailed Chris Davis by 3 home runs, 46 to 43, and had 130 RBI to Davis’s 118. A repeat Triple Crown was within reach. But a nagging injury that required surgery following the season led to him hitting only 1 more home run and tallying just 7 RBI over the last 31 games of the season (6 of which Cabrera missed entirely). Miggy would miss fall 9 short of the home run title and lose the RBI title on the last day of the season, but his Triple Crown rank of 5 would be the lowest of any player looking to repeat the feat.

The Elephant in the Room

Back to the home run hitters. Obviously, I’m somewhat intentionally leaving out the significant fact that the three players who hit more home runs than Judge are all tainted by the steroids scandal of the late-’90s and early-2000s. I’m not naïve enough to pretend it didn’t happen or that they didn’t cheat. To do so would be idiotic.

But the fact is that the usage of steroids – while certainly illegal when Bonds, Sosa, and McGwire were playing – wasn’t tested for, and in fact was tacitly endorsed by Major League Baseball itself. MLB needed a draw to bring fans back to the game after the owner-forced players’ strike in 1994-95 wiped out the World Series, and a chase for the most hallowed record in sports was just the thing for people to fall in love with baseball again. Baseball was all too happy to embrace McGwire and Sosa in 1998, with the public vilifying a member of the press who pointed out that McGwire had a substance that is now banned (but was legal then) in his locker for all to see. It was only after steroids became a great public scourge that MLB would throw all the drug cheats under the bus, making no mention of the incalculable sum of money the owners (and players, to be fair) pocketed off all those home runs.

So the simple fact is, those homers happened. They happened against pitchers who were using steroids. Baseball has never made any effort to vacate the numbers from the steroid era. There are no asterisks. McGwire broke Maris’s record by launching 70 balls into the stands in 1998, and then Bonds one-upped him with 73 homers three years later. There’s no denying that those home runs happened. The purist can sit there and bloviate about how they don’t recognize the steroid cheats, but as long as I can go to Baseball Reference and see that Barry Bonds hit 73 home runs in 2001 and 762 for his career, those are the records.

(And don’t talk to me about the purity of the other records. Babe Ruth’s only at bats against black players were in exhibitions and Roger Maris was a lefty hitting to a right field fence that was 296 feet from home plate.)

Is 62 That Hard?

Now that I’ve so eloquently and obviously explained why Bonds is clearly the all-time home run champion, it’s time to go back and look at how impressive Judge’s achievement was this season, and whether it truly is the “biggest single achievement in baseball in two decades”.

Since Bonds hit 73 in 2001, guys like Giancarlo Stanton, Ryan Howard, Pete Alonso, Jim Thome, Andruw Jones, and Prince Fielder have all hit 50 or more home runs in a season. Judge himself did it in his rookie year, setting the rookie record (which Alonso would beat 2 years later). None of these guys have ever been accused of any kind of steroid link.

But wait, these guys hit 50, right? 50 is not 60 (that’s your math lesson for the day). No, it’s not, but let’s look at Giancarlo Stanton’s 2017 season. Stanton hit 59 home runs, 31 of them at home in a park that was less homer friendly compared to a neutral park. Judge this season hit 30 of his 62 at Yankee Stadium, which saw home runs hit at a pace just above league average. If you were to normalize them to a league average park, Judge could be expected to hit roughly the same number of home runs, but Stanton would pick up about 6 more home runs, so 62 was not out of the question.

Let’s go back to the McGwire and Sosa in 1998. Much like Maris did in 1961, McGwire and Sosa had their magical 1998 seasons in an expansion year. When expansion happens, there’s an influx of pitchers of lesser quality who would otherwise not be in the Majors; pitchers who otherwise wouldn’t be in the Majors result in more offense, and thus more home runs. McGwire broke Maris’s record by 9 home runs, adding 14.75% to the record. By contrast, Maris broke Ruth’s record by 1 home run, and that’s with an additional 8 games on the schedule (resulting in an asterisk actually being added to Maris’s record, albeit by a crony of Ruth’s who was bitter that the Babe’s record was broken). Were steroids a contributing factor to the number of home runs McGwire and Sosa hit? Undoubtedly. Is it as significant a factor as the reduction in quality pitching that came about because of expansion? I’m not so sure, so again, even if McGwire and Sosa were clean, 62 home runs was definitely in play.

Barry Bonds is tougher to defend. Bonds is arguably one of the greatest hitters that ever lived, but his peak came right at the height of his steroid use. Still, it’s well established that Bonds began using steroids in response to seeing McGwire and Sosa – 2 players he (justifiably) viewed as inferior to him – getting all the attention for breaking the home run record. It’s not unreasonable to think, even in a clean game, Bonds focuses his efforts toward home runs instead of being an all-around hitter, and makes a run at whatever the record stood at after 1998.

Simply put, even with no steroid taint on the guys ahead of Judge, I think it’s still highly likely that someone – if not multiple people – would have broken Maris’s home run record in the now 61 years since he set the record.

The Rarity of the Triple Crown

OK, but even allowing for assumptions that some players would have hit 62 home runs anyway, or would’ve done it in a different park, that’s still only 5-7 players who would have hit 62 home runs since Maris.

True, but since World War II, only 5 guys have completed the Triple Crown (Ted Williams in ’47, Mickey Mantle in ’56, Frank Robinson in ’66, Carl Yastrzemski in ’67, and Miguel Cabrera in 2012). While Ruth’s record stood for 34 years and Maris’s for 37, there was a 45 year gap between Yastrzemski and Cabrera, and no one has completed the Triple Crown in the National League in 85 years.

There have been close calls in that time. Jim Rice finished 3rd in batting average while winning the home run and RBI titles in 1978. Gary Sheffield made a run in 1992, but finished 2 home runs and 9 RBI short. Vlad Guerrero Jr. made a run in 2021 before falling short in average and RBI. Paul Goldschmidt and Judge led all three categories at points throughout the 2022 season, with Judge only losing his lead in average in the final week of the season.

But this just proves how difficult it is to pull off the feat, and what makes Cabrera pulling it off in 2012 (and almost doing it again in 2013) so impressive. When something’s only happened once in the last 55 years, I’m giving it my vote as the “biggest single achievement in baseball in two decades”. And I’d say that even if Judge had finished the job this year (twice in 55 years makes it only marginally less impressive) or if someone other than a Tiger had pulled it off in 2012.

So Why the Hype for 62?

Look, I’m not downplaying what Judge did this season. Hitting 62 home runs is not an insignificant achievement, and doing it while also almost pulling off the Triple Crown, on top of carrying your team over the finish line to the playoffs, makes it all the more impressive.

But his chase for 62 was not worthy of the press coverage it received. Once Judge got to 60, ESPN started to cut in to regular programming for every one of Judge’s at-bats, acting as though Judge setting the Yankee and American League records were worthy of such treatment. Would you expect this much coverage for someone setting the AFC single-season rushing record?

(Yes, I realize the baseball leagues have historically been more distinctly separate than the conferences from the other leagues have been, but we’re well past the point where an American League record had any great significance.)

ESPN, Fox, and Major League Baseball made untold millions covering and promoting the home run chase in 1998, and Bonds’s subsequent chases in 2001 and 2007. Then they made untold millions more covering the fallout from the steroids era (less so for MLB in this case). Now they’re making untold millions more acting like 1998 never happened, allowing their talking heads to feed the phony 24-hour sports news cycle by screaming like lunatics about what the “real” home run record is. It’s bullshit.

It’s pretty simple. Judge hit 62. Sosa hit 63, 64, and 66. McGwire hit 65 and 70. Bonds hit 73. Those balls aren’t coming out of the seats because you want to punish the players but not the league. Someone wants to pay $2 million for the Judge ball? Fine. I say they’re idiots.

And what Miguel Cabrera did was more impressive than all of them.

Good Riddance, Kobe Bryant

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Kobe Bryant walked away from the NBA with an “epic” 60 point game on Wednesday.  And while most felt the need to comment on what an amazing farewell it was, I choose to see it as the perfect embodiment of Kobe’s me-first attitude.

kobe

And because I’m nothing if not timely – something that on this rare occasion benefited from my laziness – I’m taking this opportunity to spell out exactly why I hate Kobe so.

1996 NBA Draft

In 1995 Kevin Garnett became the first high schooler in over 2 decades to jump from high school directly to the NBA (primarily because he was too stupid to get into any of the dozens of colleges that were recruiting him).  Kobe Bryant followed suit in 1996, although admittedly he wasn’t as dumb as Garnett.  He did so with all of the class that would follow him for his entire career.

In 2010, LeBron James held a truly tasteless press conference at a Boys & Girls Club in Connecticut to announce where he’d go in free agency (although gladly we can blame this particular farce on Jim Gray).  One of the most hated aspects of his press conference was the fact that LeBron announced his choice by tone-deafly saying, “I’m going to take my talents to South Beach.”

So why are we talking about LeBron in a post about Kobe?  Because what people seem to forget was that 14 years earlier Kobe had used the exact same phrase when announcing he was skipping college, stating, “I’m going to take my talents to the NBA.”  Why we hated on LeBron for using the same line Kobe had years earlier I’ll never know, although it’s fair to say that by 2010 everybody hated Kobe, so perhaps this would’ve just been piling on.

If this was his greatest flaw relating to the draft, he could be forgiven.  It wasn’t.  Many people remember that Kobe was traded by the Hornets to the Lakers immediately following the draft.  What they – and Kobe himself, apparently – seem to forget is that Kobe pulled a John Elway and told pretty much the entire NBA that he wanted to play for the Lakers.  His agent wouldn’t allow teams to work him out (including the Hornets) and they got him to last until the 13th pick, which allowed them to pull off the trade that sent Vlade Divac to Charlotte.  Years later, Kobe maintained that Dave Cowens didn’t want him and worked the trade to the Hornets.  I believe that like I believe the girl in Colorado consented (we’ll get to that later).

2004 NBA Finals

I’m going to be very unpopular in Detroit – and by that I mean the 4 people I know who read this will be irritated and may even comment as such – for saying this, but it’s highly likely that Kobe cost the Lakers the 2004 title.

Here’s the thing: the Pistons pulled off an impressive 5-game “sweep” of the Lakers in ’04, with Kobe hitting a buzzer beater in Game 2 to send the game to overtime, ultimately leading the Lakers to win their only game.  No Kobe shot, no buzzer beater, Pistons going home with a 2-0 lead and the Lakers are done, so Kobe kept them in the series, right?  Not so.  What people forget is that the Pistons took a 6-point lead with 47 seconds left.  Then Shaquille O’Neal took over.  He dropped a layup with 35 seconds left, got fouled, hit the free throw (never a given considering Shaq’s free throw woes), then pulled down the defensive rebound that ultimately allowed Kobe to tie the game.  Shaq then scored 6 of the Lakers’ 10 points in overtime (although to be fair Kobe scored the other 4 and the Pistons only scored 2) and the Lakers went back to Detroit tied.

Shaq was a beast in that series.  He scored 26.6 points per game and shot 63.1% from the field.  And he should’ve scored a ton more.  Kobe took 113 shots in the series to Shaq’s 84, almost 6 shots more per game.  This might have made sense if Kobe hadn’t shot at a 38.1% clip.  In game 1, Shaq was 13-16 with 34 points.  For every shot he took,  he scored 2.13 points.  Kobe was 10-27, scoring less than a point per attempt.  So why the hell did Kobe take 11 more shots than Shaq did when the Pistons couldn’t stop him inside?  As Shaq said at the time, “Beats the hell out of me.”

Kobe and Shaq were engaged in a heated battle of “Who’s Team Is It” in 2004, ultimately leading to Shaq’s trade after the 2004 season.  Kobe was fine with the Lakers’ three-peat from 2000-02 (and Shaq’s 3 Finals MVP awards), but by ’04 he wanted the Lakers to be “his” team.  Did he want it enough to effectively sabotage his team by taking the ball out of Shaq’s hands and trying to play the hero?  Knowing Kobe’s personality like we do, I say hell yes, especially since he already had 3 rings.

Let’s do a simple breakdown (and yes, this is VERY simple).  If Shaq takes 10 more shots per game in that series and Kobe takes 10 fewer, several of the games probably turn out very differently.  Take Game 1.  Ten more shots for Shaq at the previously mentioned 2.13 points per attempt comes out to 21 more points, while Kobe’s 10 fewer points costs the Lakers only 9 points.  The Lakers net an extra 12 points in a game they lose by 12.  Do the Lakers win the game in that circumstance?  Possibly/probably.  Let’s give it to the Pistons just for argument’s sake, so with the Lakers’ OT win in Game 2 it’s 1-1 going back to Detroit.  Game 3 was a 20 point win for Detroit and any change in play probably doesn’t make a difference.  But make the same change in Game 4 and the Lakers net 9 extra points in a game they lost by 8.  It’s a 2-2 series and the Lakers are guaranteed to take the series back to L.A.  Game 5 went to the Pistons and, as with Game 3, any change in shot selection by the 2 superstars probably doesn’t change the outcome.  But with the Lakers holding home court in Games 6 and 7, and winning 2 of the 3 hypothetically close games, it’s not unreasonable to think the Lakers take the series if the ball’s going to Shaq more thank Kobe.

The ’04 series is looked at as one of the biggest upsets and most unlikely titles in NBA history, although that was somewhat tempered when the Pistons took the Spurs to Game 7 in the ’05 Finals; had the best record in the league in 2006 (where they lost to Shaq’s Heat in the conference finals); and were taken down by LeBron’s coming out party in 2007.  But I have to think that if it wasn’t for Kobe’s selfishness, we may well have had a different champion that year and the Pistons would’ve joined the Buffalo Bills in terms of missed opportunities.

2006 Suns Series Game 7

By 2006 the Lakers were a shell of themselves, making the playoffs as the Western Conference’s 7-seed, facing off against the highly-favored Phoenix Suns.  They held a 3-1 series lead before the Suns won the next 2 to force Game 7 in Phoenix.  Kobe was 8-13 in the first half, scoring 23 points, but quit in the second half, taking 3 shots and scoring 1 point as the Suns blew the Lakers out of the arena.

Kobe said after the game that in order to get back in the game they needed to have everyone contributing.  That’s bullshit.  Despite the fact that he willed his team to Game 7 (and almost pulled off the upset in Game 6 before losing in OT), Kobe knew his team was crap and decided to prove it by taking the second half of Game 7 off.  You can find columns by Lakers fans that will tell you that Kobe found guys with open looks, but Kobe’s not an assist man.  Kobe quit.

On the plus side – for Kobe anyway – he was able to prove that his team was crap, which allowed the Lakers to swindle the Grizzlies (run by Lakers’ legend Jerry West) for Pau Gasol, leading the Lakers to titles in 2009 and 2010.

But still…can you picture Michael Jordan taking a quarter off to prove a point?  Or is it more realistic that he’d try to throw the team on his back and try to pull the win?

Black Mamba Nickname

Look, this is a short one.  Kobe gave himself a nickname.  It’s a decent nickname, one that fits his personality, but the fact remains he gave himself a nickname.  He didn’t have enough friends – or the respect of his teammates or the media – who would give him a nickname, so he came up with one himself.

Only sociopaths give themselves nicknames.  I’m pretty sure the Zodiac Killer gave himself that nickname.

The Rape Charges

Kobe’s a rapist.  It’s not really open to interpretation.  Hell, he admitted it when the case was settled, saying that the girl didn’t view it as consensual (here’s a hint Kobe: if you have sex with someone who doesn’t view it as consensual, that’s rape).  Lakers fans will tell you she was a whore, that she had the DNA of 3 different guys in her underwear.  That may be true, but it also doesn’t mean that she wanted to fuck Kobe.

Of course, because the defense – and Lakers fans – attacked the girl’s character (which, to be fair, is part of their job), the victim decided to take a settlement from Kobe to avoid having to take the stand.  Now, I don’t know what the settlement amount was, but it took a $4 million ring to keep his wife from divorcing him after the ordeal.  I’m guessing it took a helluva lot more to keep him out of prison.

(Also, Kobe married a whore.  If you take a $4 million ring in exchange for staying with a guy, you’re a whore.  But hey, to each their own.)

And let’s not forget he threw his teammates under the bus when he was charged.  No one pretends professional athletes are saints – Magic Johnson didn’t get HIV sitting in his hotel room reading the Bible (just ask A.C. Green).  Plenty have cheated.  In fact, Kobe’s own team had an internal crisis when DeAngelo Russell secretly videotaped Nick Young admitting he had cheated on his fiance and the video went public.  The problem was never that Young had cheated, but that Russell had violated his teammates’ trust by secretly videotaping the discussion.  But when the rape charges came out, Kobe was quoted as saying, “I should’ve just paid her, that’s what Shaq does.”  In other words, Kobe’s a snitch.  Ask Carmelo what happens to snitches.

Barry Bonds is a pariah.  So are Roger Clemens, Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa, and Rafael Palmeiro.  None of them raped anyone.  None of them had so much as a misdemeanor on their record, as far as anyone knows.  They retired – or in Bonds’s case was blacklisted into retirement – and baseball immediately pissed on their proverbial coffins because of their links to baseball’s steroid scandal.  Kobe Bryant gets a farewell tour.  Fuck the NBA.

The Farewell

As I said before, Kobe’s farewell game was the perfect ending to his me-first career.  It was obvious his teammates were told to feed Kobe the ball as much as possible, which is fine, but it allowed a rapist to walk off a hero (and overshadowed the Warriors setting the all-time record for wins in a season).

The problem with Kobe’s farewell was not just that it lasted the entire year, but that the Lakers admitted they had sacrificed the season in deference to celebrating Kobe.  Thing is, they gave Kobe a 2-year, $48 million extension for his last 2 seasons, when he was clearly on the downside of his career.  Hell, they signed him to the extension when he was recovering from a torn Achilles, so there was no guarantee he’d provide any kind of meaningful play.  A farewell tour is nice, $24 million a year when you’re a crap player – which Kobe was – is nicer.  And allowing your team to sacrifice the development of their younger players and killing the team’s salary cap so you could get a proper send off is horse shit.

And so very Kobe.

Back to that farewell game.  Kobe scored 60 points.  Amazing, right?  I mean, even I shouldn’t crap on that.  Except I can.  Kobe took 50 shots.  You give any NBA player 50 shots and they’re going to put up points.  Kobe was 22-50, or 44%, from the field.  The league-wide average was 45.2%.  The NBA average came out to 1.21 points per attempt; Kobe was at 1.20.  In other words, for a guy who put up 50 shots, Kobe was below average.  For comparison, in his 81-point game in 2006 – truly an epic performance – Kobe put up 46 shots.

But that doesn’t even tell the whole story.  It’s not so much that Kobe put up 50 shots, it’s that he didn’t even acknowledge that he had teammates on many of those possessions.  Anytime the Lakers pulled down a rebound, they handed the ball to Kobe and got out of his way.  He didn’t try to find an open man – although, again, Kobe’s not an assist guy – he just did whatever he could to put up a shot and rack up the points.  Kobe could’ve played the game 1-on-5 and there would’ve been no noticeable difference to what he did in his farewell game.  His fans will tell you that he hit the game winning shot, and that he pulled off a full-court assist leading to a game-clinching dunk to close out his career.  His haters – myself included – will say it’s a meaningless game and the assist only came about because he didn’t have time to get down the court on his own.

Kobe Bryant’s farewell was the perfect capper to his career.  It allowed his fans to fawn over his 60 points and his critics to point out what a selfish player he was.  It was a manufactured farce that doesn’t belong in the same conversation as the final games of John Elway, Ted Williams, Derek Jeter, or even Peyton Manning.  It sure as shit wasn’t epic.

Kobe Bryant was the most selfish, me-first player of his generation, and perhaps of all time.  He was, quite literally, never the best player in the league (Don’t believe me?  Check this out…he was never better than third).  You could argue that he wouldn’t make the Lakers’ all-time starting 5 (on a team that’s had players like Magic Johnson, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Wilt Chamberlain, Jerry West, Elgin Baylor, and Shaquille O’Neal, this is far from a ridiculous statement).  He rigged the draft to suit his desires.  He never won a title without Shaquille O’Neal or Pau Gasol (compare Kobe’s supporting casts to Michael Jordan’s).  He quite possibly cost his team a title that would’ve allowed him to match Jordan’s six.  He tanked another series out of spite.  He raped a woman and snitched on his teammates when lamenting his crime.  For all that he got a heroes goodbye.

Not from me.  I say good riddance.  Don’t let the door hit you in the ass on the way out.

On Karma and Mike Ilitch

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(Before I begin, it’s important to point out that I worked for the Ilitch family for five years.  None of what I write below has anything to do with my employment with the organization.  I left of my own free will.  This observation is based solely on my sports fandom and interest in the city as a whole.)

Sports Illustrated recently ran a story about spring training in 1995.  Included in that story was a tale about Sparky Anderson taking a stand and essentially ending his managerial career.  In his autobiography he called it his proudest moment.  In taking that stand he began to expose a little-known fact about one of the most beloved individuals in Detroit sports.

Mike Ilitch is kind of a dick.

Let’s start with a little history lesson.

In 1994, MLB owners decided that the finances of the game didn’t work for them.  Less than four years after being assessed damages of $280 million for colluding against free agents, the owners unilaterally decided that they would implement a salary cap.  The players balked – naturally, because salary caps are stupid – so the owners responded by refusing to pay a required $7.8 million to the players’ pension and benefit plan.  The players responded by going on strike, eventually leading to the cancellation of the 1994 World Series.

Early in 1995 the owners abandoned their salary cap plans; announced they would use replacement players (more on that shortly); abolished salary arbitration; centralized player negotiations with the commissioner’s office – which is bothersome on a number of levels that we won’t get into here; and ended an agreement not to collude on salaries.  The players filed an unfair labor practices complaint with the National Labor Relations Board.  Future Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotmayor issued an injunction against the owners, the old agreement was put back in place, and the players returned to work.  An agreement was eventually reached in November 1996 and baseball hasn’t seen a work stoppage since.

Now back to those replacement players…

The owners announced in January that they would use replacement players for the 1995 season.  Apparently they were dumb enough to think fans were just as willing to pay to watch Kevin Millar, Pete Rose Jr. and a 48-year-old Pedro Borbon play as they were to watch Barry Bonds, Ken Griffey Jr. and Greg Maddux.  There were a few interesting side notes to the replacement player ordeal.  The Baltimore Orioles decided they wouldn’t use replacement players.  Depending on whom you ask, this was because Peter Angelos made the bulk of his money representing Baltimore labor unions and their members.  Realistically, however, it was probably because the use of replacement players would end Cal Ripken Jr.’s run at Lou Gehrig’s consecutive games streak and cost the team a significant chunk of money in ticket sales and merchandising.

The Toronto Blue Jays announced they would play their home games at their spring training facility in Dunedin, Florida, because Canadian law prohibited companies from using replacement workers during a strike or lockout.  That they were willing to play their games at a minor league stadium probably says something about their expected attendance numbers with the replacement players.

And Sparky Anderson decided he wouldn’t manage the scabs.

Tigers’ owner Mike Ilitch was livid, placing Sparky on unpaid leave.  To be fair, this was a somewhat charitable move by the team considering Ilitch wanted to fire Sparky on the spot.  After the season Sparky left the team, never to manage in the Majors again, despite the fact that he was still interested in managing and was only 61 years old.

In 2000 Sparky was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame.  When deciding what hat to wear on his plaque, he chose the Cincinnati Reds, a team he had managed half as long as he had managed the Tigers and also a team that had fired him (say whatever you want about the Tigers, they never officially fired him).  People in Detroit were not happy.  The Tigers held a “Sparky Anderson Day” in 2000, though they didn’t retire his number (no one ever wore #11 after Sparky).

In 2009, the Tigers held a 25th anniversary of their last World Series championship.  Sparky appeared frail; it would be his last appearance in Detroit.  If the Tigers were going to retire his number, it would’ve been the perfect time.  They didn’t.

Sparky died in November 2010.  The Tigers retired his number in 2011.  I find it to be no small coincidence that Sparky’s number wasn’t retired until after he passed away.

And for that I blame Mike Ilitch.

I don’t think Sparky should’ve had his number retired.  But if they were going to retire his number, there was absolutely no reason not to do it when he was still alive.

I’ll explain.

Years back, very early in my love affair with baseball, I heard a tale that the Tigers did not retire numbers for the majority of their history because Ty Cobb was their best player, and he didn’t wear a number that could be retired.  That lasted until 1980, when Al Kaline’s #6 was retired shortly after his enshrinement in the Hall of Fame.  In 1983, Charlie Gehringer and Hank Greenberg had their numbers retired, with Hal Newhouser following in 1997.  Up until that time, the only Tigers who had had their numbers retired were not only Hall of Famers, but they went into the Hall of Fame as Tigers.

Willie Horton’s number was retired in 2000.  Bluntly, it was an affirmative action retirement.  It was believed that a city with a population that was over 80% black and a history of race issues should have a black player with his number retired.  Horton was a bad choice – among black players in Tigers’ history Lou Whitaker would’ve been the better choice – but he was a good enough player, he was a key member of the 1968 world champions, he was from Detroit and he supposedly walked through the Detroit riots in 1967 in his uniform trying to quell the violence.

(Incidentally, Ilitch once “unretired” the number of Larry Aurie with the Red Wings.  Save for a short time when Aurie’s cousin wore his #6 with the Wings in the 1950’s, no one has worn the number again, but Aurie is not honored with a banner in the rafters as the other Red Wings’ retired numbers are.)

Still, I’ve always lived with the notion that in order to have your number retired by the Tigers you had to go into the Hall of Fame as a Tiger.  This is likely another myth I was told by some random stranger when I was a child at Tigers games, because I can’t dig anything up to support that either.  But if you ignore Willie Horton’s number (and you should), the myth stood.  And because of that myth, and because Sparky Anderson went into the Hall of Fame as a Red, his number shouldn’t have been retired.

But retire it they did.  And they did it horribly.  And they did it because Mike Ilitch is a dick.

Sparky Anderson refused to manage replacement players when the owners were so devious in their negotiations that an unfair labor practice complaint was upheld, and Ilitch hated him for it.  I imagine deep within the recesses of the Ilitch organization, there was a decree that Anderson’s number would be retired only after he was dead.

Larry Aurie?  The Ilitches have never addressed it.  His family has repeatedly requested an answer, and the Ilitches have given them nothing.  The best explanation came from Wings’ vice president Jimmy Devellano, who said in a 1997 article that Aurie’s number wasn’t in the rafters because he wasn’t in the Hockey Hall of Fame.  If it’s really that simple, there’s no reason it should’ve taken 15 years – from the time Ilitch bought the team until Devellano gave his answer – for the family to get an explanation.  And there’s no reason it couldn’t come from someone in the family.

The Ilitch family is looked at as one of Detroit’s saviors.  To an extent they are.  They moved their corporate headquarters from the Detroit suburbs to a restored Fox Theatre in 1989.  They built a new ballpark for the Tigers downtown and encouraged the Lions to do the same.  They’re currently building a new arena for the Wings and headquarters for Little Caesars in their Foxtown district.  They have contributed a great deal of money to the Detroit economy.

They’ve also taken a great deal from it.

That ballpark was partially financed – to the tune of $115 million – by public funds, including Indian casino revenue.  Interestingly, Marian Ilitch – Mike’s wife – owns Motor City Casino in Detroit, a casino that is very much not Indian.  The new arena and downtown headquarters?  $285 million of the $650 million cost of that project will come from public financing.  That financing was requested from and approved by a lame duck state legislature at the same time Detroit was in the middle of the largest municipal bankruptcy in U.S. history.

They received 39 vacant parcels of land from the city for $1.  They paid $50 million buying out private owners in the area.

They refused to sign a community benefits agreement that would ensure a certain percentage of permanent, non-construction jobs at the arena went to Detroiters.

The Ilitches are reportedly worth $4.8 billion.

I understand this is business as usual in the sports world.  It doesn’t make it right.

The Ilitches have been working on a new arena for the Red Wings for some time now.  One of the worst kept secrets in the city was exactly where that arena would be built.  Hell, in 2000 the Ilitches opened Hockeytown Café in the Foxtown district, across the street from Comerica Park.  Hockeytown is a mile away from Joe Louis Arena.  It will be 2 blocks from the new arena.

Behind Fox Theatre and a block away from Hockeytown Café lie blocks of unpaved parking lots and abandoned unsightly buildings.

Sorry, that needs to be restated.

Behind Fox Theatre and a block away from Hockeytown Café lie blocks of Ilitch-owned unpaved parking lots and abandoned unsightly buildings.  When the new arena was announced, it was asked of the family why nothing had been done to develop those areas.  Chris Ilitch, Mike’s son and the current president and CEO of the family organization, gave a very simple answer: they couldn’t develop the area because doing so would have driven up the value of the surrounding areas that they were trying to acquire for the arena.

If it doesn’t benefit them, they’re not doing it.

There’s a building – or what’s left of a building – 2 blocks west of Comerica Park on Adams Street in Detroit.  All that’s left is the building’s façade that is supported by scaffolding that hangs over the sidewalk, a sidewalk that is travelled by hundreds of thousands of baseball fans when the Tigers are in town.  The remainder of the building was torn down because the organization would’ve lost a $2 million credit had they not pulled it down when they did.  As for the façade?  Well that’s still there because it’s still eligible for tax incentives for historical buildings.  It looks like shit and there hasn’t been work done on that building in years, but they’re keeping it just in case.

They’ll tear down their crumbling buildings, but they’re not going to pay for it.

I’ll say it again.  The Ilitches are reportedly worth $4.8 billion.

Now I’ll bet some of you are asking, “What does Sparky Anderson not getting his number retired until after he died have to do with the business dealings of the Ilitch family?”  To me, the answer is somewhat simple.

Karma.

I don’t know if karma exists.  You like to think it does, that bad people are going to get what’s coming to them.  But the more you watch the news and see that executives who play a huge rule in destroying their companies, not to mention the lives of the people who work for those companies, getting golden parachutes to leave, you start to wonder.  Personally, the greatest example of karma I’ve seen lately was when the Cowboys were screwed out of what was probably a legit catch that would’ve gone a long way toward winning their playoff game a week after they’d taken advantage of a horrendous call that helped them beat the Lions in the Wild Card game.  That’s about as simple as it gets.  Other people?  You never know.

But I look at Mike Ilitch and his family, and I wonder.

It is well known in Detroit that Mike Ilitch wants to win a title with the Tigers before he dies.  Now, if he hadn’t spent the first 14 years of his ownership basically ignoring the team, save for financing a new park and signing a couple of big name free agents when no one else would, he might have had that title by now.  But nevertheless, he wants to win.  And he spends to win.  And that spending has brought him teams that were legitimate title contenders.  His 2006 Tigers team collapsed in the World Series with a ridiculous comedy of errors and lost to a team with 83 wins.  I still contend the 2007 team was title worthy, but they collapsed in the last month of the season.  The 2009 team was done in by some horrendous decisions and at least one terrible umpire’s call in the infamous “Game 163”.  They had a chance in 2011, but the Rangers were probably better and you never know how they would’ve fared in the World Series against St. Louis.  In 2012 they got shut down in the World Series and scored a total of 6 runs in 4 games.  The 2013 team might’ve had the best chance of them all, but dumb luck, great pitching by the Red Sox and some bad fielding cost them a chance at the World Series.

Since 2006, the Tigers probably should have won at least 1 World Series, and to suggest that they could’ve won as many as 4 is not ridiculous (a bit farfetched perhaps, but not ridiculous).  And yet they have none.

The Tigers are becoming the Buffalo Bills (although in 3 of their 4 Super Bowl losses, the Bills really had no chance at kickoff).

There have been some questionable moves by Detroit management in the past few years.  Jarrod Washburn and Aubrey Huff didn’t work out, but there was no reason to think they wouldn’t, and it’s not like the Tigers gave up much.  They probably shouldn’t have cut Gary Sheffield before the 2009 season considering they were still going to pay him.  The Doug Fister traeidfhjpaetupaousljcmvajouiekjamnvas

Sorry, brief Doug Fister Trade Induced Seizure (it’s a legitimate medical diagnosis here in Detroit).

But the Tigers are not the Lions.  There have been far more good moves than bad.  When they made a bad move (Prince Fielder), they corrected it with a good one (dumping him for Ian Kinsler).  There’s no one calling for a team legend’s head because he used valuable payroll space to sign Charlie Villanueva and Ben Gordon.

So one wonders why one of these teams hasn’t been holding the trophy at the end of the year.

And I think its karma.  Mike Ilitch wants a title, and karma won’t allow it.

Pillaging the city and the state for public financing when he could’ve finance development with his own money?  Strike one.

Leaving large swaths of land that could’ve been developed dilapidated and rotting because it would’ve driven up your price to acquire other land?  Strike two.

Waiting until after Sparky Anderson died to retire his number?  Strike three.

And I’m not even bringing up the glorious managerial tenures of Buddy Bell, Larry Parrish or Luis Pujols, or the disastrous reign of GM Randy Smith.

I can’t say I don’t wish death on anyone – I have irrational hatreds toward guys like Roger Goodell and an unhealthy number of politicians – but I certainly don’t wish it upon Mike Ilitch or his family.  For as much as I don’t like what they’ve done to acquire land and finance their development, there’s no denying that his investment in the city has been a huge help.  It’s hard to imagine where Detroit would be without him.

But I do wonder if the baseball gods are looking down and seeing what’s gone on with this team and this city and said, “Nope, not while he’s around.”

Sparky Anderson dies.  The Tigers retire his number the following year.

Mike Ilitch dies.  Do the Tigers win his elusive title the following year?

Only time will tell.  I hope it doesn’t take that long.

Note: This post has been corrected to properly reflect the Ilitches’ net worth.  Forbes recently reported that they are currently worth $4.8 billion, not $3.2 billion as originally indicated.

Why Sports?

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As a lot of you (translation: my dad) have noticed, I haven’t written in a while.  There are a lot of reasons for this.  Work doesn’t like it when I spend time writing for my personal blog, I like to drink, TV has some really cool stuff going on, I like to drink and I’m also pretty damn lazy.  Also, I like to drink.  But in reality, it might come down to one damning thing.

Sports just aren’t as fun anymore.

Let’s do a little history lesson.  First off, I didn’t get “big” into sports until my dad had moved away to Illinois.  This isn’t any criticism, but there really wasn’t any history of me sitting on the couch watching my dad get pumped up about the Bears, so a lot of my loyalties have varied and the start of my histories with certain sports tie in to when local teams were good.

Now that you know that…

I got off to a good start.  My first sports memory was the 1984 Tigers winning the World Series.  I didn’t have much of a memory of that team, but I do remember the end of that final game.  From there it was on to the ’85 Bears, whom I picked up with my dad and will still argue are the best team of all time.  In ’87 Michigan State’s football team went to the Rose Bowl for the first time in over 20 years.  In ’88 the Pistons should’ve beaten the Lakers in the NBA Finals, and in ’89 they did.  That same year Michigan fired their basketball coach then won the NCAA basketball title (at that age you could switch collegiate loyalties as often as you changed underwear, so at least once a week).  In 1989 the Lions drafted the greatest running back not named Jim Brown; in 1991 they were a win away from the Super Bowl.

And those were just the local teams.  For some reason I liked Jose Canseco, so I watched the A’s win the Earthquake World Series in ’89.  That same year – as with all summers from the time I was 10 until I was 16 – I spent the summer at my dad’s place in Illinois and watched the Cubs on WGN every afternoon.  They went to the playoffs that year and I’ve been a fair weather Cubs fan ever since.  I loved Joe Montana, and I watched the 49ers win Super Bowls 23 and 24 as Montana cemented his legacy as one of the greatest quarterbacks of all time.  My brother picked up hockey and the New York Rangers in 1994, so I learned the sport along with him (while wondering why Chris Osgood left the net).  And perhaps the biggest “betrayal” for any Michigan sports fan: in 1993 I discovered my dad was a Bulls fan and picked them up when the Pistons were down.  I stuck with them through the 72-win season in ’96, although the Dennis Rodman pickup helped me justify that one.

By 1997, the Red Wings had gotten off the schneid, beaten the shit out of the Colorado Avalanche, and would win 4 Cups in just over a decade.  The Pistons got over the teal era, and won one of the more unexpected titles in NBA history while going to 6 Eastern Conference Finals in a row.  The Tigers got over 13 consecutive losing seasons – including the worst year in American League history – by going to the World Series on a walkoff home run by Magglio Ordonez.  Michigan State’s basketball team capitalized on sanctions at Michigan and went to 4 straight Final Fours and won the national title in 2000 (my collegiate loyalties were locked in when I decided to go to East Lansing to study journalism for 6 weeks before I found out what journalists make).  The Spartan football team became a power and we’ve won 10+ games 4 times in 5 years, won a Rose Bowl, don’t measure our success on whether or not we beat Michigan, and talk about national titles without being called delusional.

I even gave up on the 49ers and shed my fair weather reputation when they fired Steve Mariucci and became a full-time Lions fan.  Then the Lions hired him and I completely understood what the 49ers were doing.  But while the Lions went through a stretch that would rival or even exceed the stretch the Tigers put us through, they weren’t contracted or moved, they didn’t have the Thanksgiving game taken away from them and they’ve even made the playoffs.

Things were good.

But dig deeper and it’s not hard to poke holes in the facade.  For a sporting society that lives on the idea of “Second place is the first loser”, a 4-team city (not counting the 2 Big 10 schools in the area) that hasn’t won a title since 2008 – with no teams that scream out that they’re favorites to win anytime soon – doesn’t leave a fan happy.  The average title drought for the teams in this city is over 26 years (the Lions surely don’t help that average), and within those droughts are some painful sporting legacies:

  • Tigers: David Ortiz’s grand slam in the 2013 ALCS, six total runs scored in 2012 World Series, pitchers forget how to field in 2006 World Series
  • Lions: only team to go 0-16
  • Pistons: team wide mutiny after starting 37-5 in 2006 Eastern Conference finals, destroyed by LeBron games in 2007 ECF, utter disaster of Charlie Villanueva and Ben Gordon deals
  • Red Wings: blew 3-2 lead to lose 2009 Stanley Cup Final

But that’s not it.

Should the Tigers have won a World Series by now?  Probably.  Should the Wings have repeated in ’09?  Possibly.  Could the Pistons have won more than 1 title in their 6-year run?  Definitely.  Should the Lions…hmm…um…

Every city’s got one of those teams.

And yes, these things start to wear on fans.  This isn’t the World Cup where a tiny country can be thrilled that not only did they qualify, but they also played a powerhouse to a scoreless draw.  Or the Olympics, where we watch a guy almost drown while simultaneously celebrate his ability to complete.  This is America.  We don’t just go to enjoy the games, we pull for our teams to win championships and we know exactly when the last time it happened for all of our states (1957, 1984, 2004, 2009).

But no, it’s not the woulda-coulda-shoulda that takes the fun sports.  In fact, to a large extent that’s exactly what makes it fun.

But it’s not that either.

Everyone in America watched the Great Home Run Chase of 1998.  We watched as this man who seemed destined for years to break the most hallowed record in American sports fought off a personable upstart, and then hit the magical mark of 70, a mark that seemed almost as unbreakable as the 60 that Babe Ruth hit in 1927.

Then 3 years later someone else hit 73.

I, like everyone else, was blinded to the fact that Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa and Barry Bonds were chemically enhanced when they broke the record.  And as the years went on I didn’t much care, because it turned out that everyone in the game was juiced.  I care that it was clear that those chemical enhancements cheapened that magical summer, that 73 isn’t anywhere near as romantic as 60 or 61*, that there are many who still believe that 755 is the home run record.

But no, that’s not quite it either.

It’s who I’m giving my money to.

As I’ve said before, I believe sports owners to be among the most despicable people on earth.  The history of professional sports is littered with stories of owners doing whatever they could to pay the players – the people the fans are coming to see – as little as possible, to treat them as chattel, to restrict their rights, to control what they wear.  It continues to this day, with the NFL fining players $10,000 for wearing Beats headphones to mandatory post-game press conferences.  “Guys, we know Beats is the big thing now, but we’ve got a contract with Motorola which, believe it or not, is still in business.”  And yet somehow the fans paint the players as greedy whenever there’s a work stoppage.

But no, we’re still not quite there.

No, it’s the fact that these people I give so much money to – and I’ve given a ridiculous sum of money to professional sports owners over the years – not only don’t give a fuck about anyone to whom they’re responsible (fans, players, employers, families, etc.), but they think we’re stupid enough to buy their shit.

That’s it.

I started thinking about this post as I boatgated before the first game of the Lions’ season.  It was that day that the infamous video of Ray Rice knocking out his now wife went public.  The Ravens acted quickly, cutting Rice.  The NFL was in a bit of spot, because they’d already determined that watching a guy dragging his unconscious fiance out of an Atlantic City elevator was only worth a 2-game suspension.  Nevertheless, the League suspended him again, a suspension that has been reversed because it turns out that you can’t suspend a guy for the same action when the only thing that changed was that the whole world saw what you’ve already clearly known.

Over the next few weeks I watched intently as Roger Goodell insisted they hadn’t seen the tape when they clearly had.  As Vikings ownership suspended Adrian Peterson for beating the shit out of his 4-year-old son, then activated him, then suspended him again when advertisers yanked their support.  As the NFL somehow made people who had beaten their wives and children into sympathetic figures.

Sports just didn’t really feel great anymore.

That was over 3 months ago.  I sat there watching that video thinking to myself, “Do I really want to support this company anymore?”  When does the NFL become Wal-Mart, or Apple, or GM?

Including that Monday Night game, I’ve been to 4 NFL games since then.  I am the problem.

The NFL handed out painkillers and steroids like they were tic-tacs until Lyle Alzado died of a brain tumor and went public believing that the two were related.  They fought the disability claims of players who were living in their cars with dementia caused by constant helmet-to-helmet collisions.  They ignored the somewhat obvious fact that concussions could have long lasting impact (you know, beyond the 3 plays that the NFL thought they had), despite the fact that concussion issues were a plot point in Varsity Blues, which came out in 19-freaking-99 (thanks Bill Simmons…asshole).  And now they’re trying to convince us they’re concerned about domestic violence while giving a 2-game suspension to a guy who knocked out his wife and then dragged her out of an elevator.

Hell, we can’t even escape politics on the field.  When players throughout the country have expressed their Constitutionally-protected right to express their opinions (whether the venue for those opinions were appropriate is for everyone to decide on their own) about high-profile police killings they’ve gotten shot down by fans and police spokespeople.  Never mind that it was members of those police departments that led to the demonstrations in the first place.  No, it’s the young black man – and it’s always a black man – expressing his opinion who’s the problem.

And yet through this entire mess, the NFL has lost not one single viewer.  Not even me.  The only Lions games I’ve missed this year were because there were more important Tigers games taking place at the same time.  And until they start losing viewers (and, more importantly, money), what the NFL does about these public relations disasters won’t matter.

Sports have just gotten less enjoyable.  I’ll get enraged by people at the bar who have differing opinions about trades the Tigers have made.  I’ve had the text message equation of a knock-down, drag-out brawl with a friend of mine who suggested I had gone off the deep end because of how I felt about Brad Ausmus’s bullpen usage.  I was genuinely afraid he was going to have a stroke, which leads me to believe he’s got a mindset about sports not far off from mine.

Which brings me back to the whole point of this post.  Why sports?

And then I think of this picture.

2014-10-26 16.42.24-2 (2)

That’s what sports is.  That’s a picture taken after the Lions had beaten the Falcons in London on a last-second field goal in October.  My friend and I hadn’t been getting along all that great, mostly because I’ve got thin skin and take things personally.  But after that game, we just celebrated and chatted with foreign (wait, I guess we were the foreigners) football fans in a magnificent stadium.

It’s an excuse to travel to see  faraway friends, like the friend who moved to Germany for business.  That’s why we were in London in the first place.  Without the Lions, I don’t know if we’d make that trip.  You’d like to think that friendships survive thousands of miles, but you don’t know.  Having your teams to talk about makes it easier.

It’s complaining with your dad over text about our football teams.  It’s a bit hard to be sympathetic to his plight.  As bad as the Bears have been, they still have 1985.  While I haven’t been a full-time Lions fan since birth, geography has required me to follow them since I’ve been watching football.  We don’t talk on the phone much anymore – why bother when texting and email is so much easier – but every Sunday we text about our teams.

Talking to strangers has always been an issue for me.  I can’t talk to women.  It’s a crippling issue that has kept me single far longer than I’d like.  But I can inject myself into a random conversation about the 2002 Fiesta Bowl or whether Roger Clemens belongs in the Hall of Fame like it’s nobody’s business.  I spent a long chunk of my life feeling weird about myself, and being involved in a sports conversation makes me feel normal.

So I guess that’s why sports.

My Confusion with the Steroid Era

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In 1998, after a game in which he hit one of his 70 home runs, a reporter noticed a bottle of androstenedione in Mark McGwire’s locker and naturally asked about it.  The reporter caught the 5th degree for asking about a substance that was banned by numerous sporting agencies, but not MLB.

Today, 12 players were suspended 50 games, and Alex Rodriguez for 211, for their links to the Biogenesis lab in Miami.

While it’s unlikely that there will ever be a beginning and end of the steroid era in baseball, to me there’s something about these two events that strike me as similar to the Nazis marching into Poland and the Battle of Berlin.

(I realize it’s a horrible analogy…work with me here.)

I’m torn on the PED issue in sports.  In the 1960’s, if you tore your ACL, your career was pretty much over.  Today it costs you a hear, but your career goes on.  When Tommy John blew out his elbow, his surgeon game him a 1 in 100 chance of pitching again.  Now the surgery’s named after John (I feel like Frank Jobe got gypped there and it’s forgotten that John won 288 games) and kids in high school and college have the surgery done as preventative measures.  Hell, you can get laser eye surgery and have 20/20 vision in a week now.

Can someone explain to me how these aren’t “performance enhancing”?

I get it…drugs are bad.  But are they?  What are the downsides to HGH?  Joint swelling…joint pain…carpal tunnel syndrome…an increased risk of diabetes.  It may also be a risk factor for Hodgkin’s lymphoma, which sounds a little shitty, but your survival rate is over 80%.  My question is this: if those are your potential side effects, and using this drug is the difference between being a career minor leaguer and making the big leagues and pretty much set for life, wouldn’t you at least consider taking it?

I think if you say no you’re lying.

I get that steroids are the scourge of professional sports world, but I imagine that most people who get on their high horse about steroids would quickly take a drug that would put them into their next echelon of their given occupation.  If you wouldn’t, you’re a better man than me.

So maybe I’m not torn.

I have no morals when it comes to sports (well, aside from college sports, but that’s a whole other discussion).  I’ve long said that if it meant the Tigers would win the World Series I’d root for a team with Hitler as their ace and Stalin as their cleanup hitter.  So considering the fact that one of the players suspended today was Jhonny Peralta, the All-Star shortstop for my beloved Tigers, one might take this post as excusing Peralta’s behavior.  I’m not.  Whether testing has been in place or not, steroids have been illegal in baseball since at least 1991, and Peralta was selfish and unfair to his teammates and fans.

But I find myself thinking back to 1998.  Baseball was still recovering from a strike that had wiped out the World Series for the first time since 1903.  Cal Ripken chased down Lou Gehrig’s consecutive games streak in 1995, but it was the home run chase of 1998 that saw the country cheering for Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa to break Roger Maris’s single season home run record.  When they both did so, and both soared past Maris’s 61 home runs (with 70 by McGwire and 66 by Sosa), it was chalked up to unqualified pitchers resulting from expansion (not unlike Maris’s own record chase in 1961).  McGwire hit 65 in 1999.  Sosa averaged 61 from 1998-2001.  Even after that breakout, after seeing McGwire’s physique explode and the banned substance in his locker, people were inclined to think the ball was juiced.  After all, home runs across the game were up.

It wasn’t until an angry, jealous black man broke McGwire’s record a scant 3 years later that the steroid talk really exploded.  Sure, McGwire looks like he’s twice the size of his rookie card, but look at the size of Barry Bonds’s head!  He must be juicing!  (He was, but so was pretty much everyone else.)  It brought us farcical Congressional hearings where Jose Canseco provided the most trustworthy testimony.  It brought us the Chicago White Sox (aka Frank Thomas) threatening to boycott investigative testing to trigger actual testing with (toothless) punishment.  It brought us the Mitchell Report, which found an employee of the Red Sox performing an investigation into steroids in baseball while – shockingly – going light on the Red Sox.  It brought us ridiculously expensive prosecutions of Barry Bonds and Rogers Clemens, neither of whom ever did a day in prison (nor should they have).  And it gave us the absurdity of the Yankees clearly orchestrating an extended suspension of Alex Rodriguez because they signed him  to an equally absurd contract.

It’s all been quite ridiculous.

Does that make it wrong?  Congress called for hearings under the guise of it being a public health crisis.  Apparently teens were watching their heroes take steroids, taking them themselves, and the side effects were causing suicides (never mind the fact that these kids were probably troubled in the first place.  Don’t get them help, blame the baseball players!).  Barry Bonds was convicted of perjury (you can debate the legitimacy of the prosecution all you want, but he was convicted).  There was a witch hunt against A-Rod because, well, A-Rod is a massive douchebag.  And let’s not kid ourselves.  Baseball is cleaner now than it’s ever been.

And to go further, it’s cleaner than every other sport?  The NFL voted in HGH testing during the last collective bargaining agreement in 2011.  The only problem is that they can’t agree on testing, which pretty much means that the entire league is on HGH.  And you’re not going to convince me that hockey and basketball, both significantly more physical games than baseball, have no issues with performance enhancing drugs.  Just because we haven’t heard about it doesn’t mean there’s not an issue.

The dirty little secret about performance enhancing drugs is that they work.  So does Tommy John surgery and knee reconstruction.  Only PED’s aren’t allowed.

And I find that very confusing.