You’ve gotta believe, as they used to say. Of course, fans of the other twenty-nine teams scattered around this nation and Canada are nourishing the same hopes, even those of the weakest teams.
Miracles do happen in baseball, even though somebody has to work hard for them. The New York Mets never had a winning season before that magical year when they first became world champions. Four years ago, the Tigers went from being their division’s longtime doormat to American League champions in a single year.
But they lost that World Series, which they were supposed to win. Last year’s Tigers’ season reminded me of the whole unsatisfactory and unlamented decade the nation just endured.
The Tigers, who had an enormous payroll and who were supposed to win everything, ended up being forced into a playoff game for the division championship. a game in which the Tigers were leading in the twelfth inning - and then lost.
That was also the week that cleanup hitter Miguel Cabrera spent a night in jail after alcohol-related domestic violence.
Sourpusses like me might say that was an apt finish for a decade that started with a tainted election, and continued through two unsatisfactory wars, scandal after scandal, the near-collapse of the car industry and the worst recession since World War II.
Well, none of that was Magglio Ordonez’s fault. Everyone who has studied the matter knows that in some way baseball, unlike any other game, mirrors the psychology of America. Back during the early days of the Cold War, the French-born historian Jacques Barzun famously said that “Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America better learn baseball.”
That’s true. There is some hard-to-define way in which the rhythms of this game mirror those of capitalism and cooperation, of individuality and teamwork. But while fans love to talk about how baseball mirrors America’s virtues, it mirrors its vices, too.
Baseball’s most famous commissioner, Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, was a pillar of financial honesty who saved the game from gambling. But he was also a racist who was dead set against allowing blacks in the major leagues.
Today, there is no more ethnic or racial discrimination in baseball. Players are no automatically longer bound to their owners forever, like slaves in the Old South. But in other ways, baseball has changed for the worse. We live in an age marked by greed, disloyalty and excess, and baseball also suffers from all those things.
There are too many teams. Too many divisions and too many playoffs. Players don’t stay on any one team for more than a few years, and that’s hard on fan loyalty. Players make too much.
Miguel Cabrera’s annual salary is more than the entire budget of the police department that locked him up last fall.
Yet in America, excesses also have a way of eventually being corrected. And who knows. Maybe, just maybe, Detroit will host a World Series again this fall. And you just gotta believe … that our state’s hotel and restaurant industries could use the money.
"Today, there is no more ethnic or racial discrimination in baseball."
Normally, Mr. Lessenberry, I find your articles poignant and astute. But your shockingly optimistic statement above instead sounds ignorant, and makes me want to LOL. Just because a person's skin colour is no longer preventing them from participating in baseball (major league or otherwise), doesn't mean their skin colour isn't preventing them from participating in baseball. You can choose where to put the quotations in that sentence. Ya dig? ;) <--- (Ironic winky smiley.) In spite of this glaring misperception of reality, you'll probably remain my favourite commentator of Michigan politics.
Posted by: Skyride_season | April 05, 2010 at 04:38 PM
Since African Americans and Latinos are proportionally more represented among baseball players than among the general population, I find it hard to see evidence of discrimination.
Posted by: Jack Lessenberry | April 05, 2010 at 05:37 PM