Bats and bodies

Both are juiced, and it's just another black eye for baseball

It's curious, isn't it, that there is always more bamboozling and hoodwinkery in baseball than in our other popular games. Oh, there are always players in every sport looking for an edge, looking to cheat, but, invariably, it's spur-of-the-moment stuff that someone pulls off instinctively in the heat of the action. Probably the most famous cheat of all was when Maradona, the Argentine soccer star, got away with fisting in a goal in the quarterfinals of the 1986 World Cup, which he then brazenly claimed was by "the hand of God."

But baseball surely leads in premeditated cheating, and has since at least the days of the Old Orioles in the 19th century, when John McGraw and his buddies would hide extra balls in the high outfield grass so they'd always have a convenient spare to pick up and chuck back to head off a surprised hitter. Through the years, many teams have been accused of using spies with binoculars to steal catchers' signs. So Sammy Sosa is descended from a long and dishonorable line of shifty tricksters. Likewise, so much of baseball chicanery has always had to do with the equipment.

Baseballs have forever been unfair game. Some of this may have to do with the fact that only in baseball does the ball belong to the defense. It's instructive that the only time I can remember there being accusations that footballs had been monkeyed with was when the home team had been charged with sneaking in special balls for the punter -- and a punt is the only time when an offensive player is, essentially, on defense. No basketball player would ever damage the ball he has to shoot with.

But baseballs have long been neatly sliced and cut, and, in the vernacular, "loaded up" with various and sundry illicit viscous liquids. Bats, too, have a criminal history. Ironically, while now the idea is to lighten a bat in order to swing it faster -- by inserting cork or sawdust or, in one memorable instance, little rubber balls -- the idea years ago was to make a bat a sturdier cudgel by hammering nails into it.

Interesting about baseball, isn't it? You never hear about this sort of stuff in sports such as golf and tennis, where the players use the equivalent of bats. Only in our National Pastime has such nefarious behavior always been part and parcel of the game.

Of course, juicing up bats and balls is only a sideshow. In a way, the Sosa brouhaha only serves to divert interest from the real issue. It's not nearly so important what illegal substances baseball players put in their bats as what illegal substances baseball players put in themselves. While the rest of the world athletic community has at least made some effort to monitor drug use and to seriously penalize offenders, baseball's so-called drug program remains a farce.

Actually, minor leaguers are checked rather stringently for drugs. It's the major leaguers, shielded by a misguided union, who have no real problems in loading up their muscles and popping check-swing home runs. How goofy is that? The only professional athletes in America who appear to have a more liberal drug program than major league baseball players are WWE wrestlers.

Of course, illegal bats sometimes break when you use them. Illegal bodies often don't break down until after the games have ended

Sports Illustrated senior contributing writer Frank Deford is a regular contributor to SI.com and appears each Wednesday on National Public Radio's Morning Edition. He is a longtime correspondent for HBO's Real Sports and his new novel, An American Summer (Sourcebooks Trade), is available at bookstores everywhere.

 

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