FORGIVEN AND FORGOTTEN

 

               If you plan to run for just about any public office in the U.S., a platform including the words “law and order” is advisable. True, those terms haven’t been in great repute of late, but I think they still carry weight. At the least, they’re better than most alternatives.

               But while we the people are tough on crimes and criminals rhetorically, this doesn’t always describe how we behave. In sports in particular we seem quite willing to overlook or forgive, especially when the wrongdoer wears a uniform to which we pledge allegiance. Even outlanders often get the benefit of the doubt when their offenses have faded from memory sufficiently.

               I’m referring specifically to baseball and we fans’ reactions to players who have been caught doping. Seventy Major League players have been busted publicly since the game finally instituted regular testing for performance-enhancing drugs in 2005, and while most of them have been individuals of no great reputation a good-sized handful had earned “star” designations. Almost all of those guys have been greeted with applause from their home fans when they returned to action, and their misdeeds either have been forgotten by opposing audiences or never noted in the first place.

And a couple of the more-notorious dopers (albeit ones who were convicted in the court of public opinion) seem poised to be voted into the game’s Hall of Fame by sportswriters who heretofore have considered themselves to be baseball’s conscience. How’s that for a kick?

Now, it’s true that on a general level taking PEDs doesn’t rank high on any scale of heinous offenses. Some people consider the practice par for the course in big-time sports, a smart move that’s worth a shot (joke intended) and no big deal if it fails. Truth to tell, though, it’s cheating in its most base form, an eyes-wide-open decision to tilt the playing fields in the interest of padding statistics and paychecks.  The edge it confers is as real as the Houston Astros’ recently exposed sign-stealing tactics. It deserves at least equal condemnation.

 That PED use is quickly forgotten is exemplified by Starling Marte and Jorge Polanco.  Marte, an outfielder of some repute, was busted and suspended in 2017 while with the Pittsburgh Pirates. Polanco became the Minnesota Twins’ starting shortstop in 2017 at age 24 but was caught using drugs the next season. Each served 80-game suspensions, the max for the offenses. Their drugs of choice, respectively, were nandrolone and stanozolol, harry-chested steroids favored by weightlifters. No question about intent there.

But maybe because they play for small-market teams that don’t get a lot of ink, both men have blended back into the game seamlessly. Polanco was rewarded by his team with a 2019 salary that was about six times what he made the previous year and was elected by fan vote to be the American League’s starting All-Star Game shortstop. Marte also got a nice raise in Pittsburgh on his return and when he was traded to the Arizona Diamondbacks before this season his suspension was hardly noted. Interestingly, his home-run totals in his first two seasons post-steroids (22 and 23) were greater than in the years he was juicing, probably causing him to wonder why he tried the stuff.

If Marte and Polanco went quietly into suspension, Ryan Braun and Alex Rodriguez did not. Braun, a Milwaukee Brewers’ star when he tested positive for testosterone in 2012, contested the ruling on grounds his urine sample was mishandled, and won in arbitration. He screamed bloody murder, threatening to sue everyone in sight and accusing the guy who handled the sample of being anti-Semitic (Braun identifies as Jewish) and, worse, a Chicago Cubs’ fan. A year later, when he was snared again in the scandal involving the Miami performance lab Biogenesis, he shamefacedly fessed up and accepted a 65-game suspension.  Although welcomed back by Milwaukee fandom, Braun was booed elsewhere on his return in 2014, but that has faded. A 2015 All Star, he was featured in MLB ads promoting baseball’s return from this year’s pandemic, signaling that all’s been forgiven upstairs.

ARod, a towering baseball figure over a 22-year career (1994-2016), was linked to PED use from the year 2000 and admitted to taking them during a 2001-03 period, before they were banned in the game.  Finally busted in 2013, he loudly took the deny-and-sue route, going so far as to dispatch pickets to march outside the commissioner’s office on his behalf. He was banned for the entire 2014 season for taking “numerous forms” of PEDs over “multiple years.” His penalty was unprecedented.

He returned for the 2015 and ’16 seasons with diminished skills and retired from baseball, but rather than fad away he’s flourished like a green bay tree. He’s a “Shark Tank” entrepreneur and A-list party guy with world-class girlfriend Jennifer Lopez, and is part of ESPN’s broadcast crew on Sunday night baseball, it’s top slot for the sport. He’s the front man for a group trying to buy the New York Mets, something he wouldn’t be if the owners kept a grudge. Hey, given time he could be commissioner.

  Rehabilitation also might be near for Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens, the aforementioned Notorious Two.  Despite brilliant diamond careers both left the game in disgrace after their long-term drug use was widely and convincingly asserted. Although neither was convicted, each faced criminal charges for lying about it under oath, Bonds’ conviction being overturned on appeal.

Predictably, from the first both were hailed as heroes where they played; Bonds is in the San Francisco Giants’ Hall of Fame and Clemens is in the Boston Red Sox’s version of same. Election to the real Hall in Cooperstown has been more problematic. Since both became eligible in 2013 for election by the baseball writers they’ve run as a kind of ticket, each pulling about 35% of the vote in their first three years (75% is needed for election), then creeping upward annually to 61% this year.

 They’ll be on the ballot for two more years and players who’ve topped 60% with time to go usually make it over the top. Next year’s Hall crop of first-year-eligibles is weak, so that might come sooner rather than later. If it happens the question won’t be whether we forgive them but whether they forgive us.      

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

              

 

 

 

 

 

 

                                                                                                                                                 

GAMING NAMING

               The anti-racism protests that have roiled many American cities these last few months may or may not result in substantive changes in our society, but they have claimed at least one “W” of a symbolic nature.  That would be the decision of the Washington National Football League team to, finally, drop the “Redskins” appellation it has hauled around since 1937. Other teams with Native-American-inspired names still cavort on various playing fields but none of their monikers is as all-around-objectionable as the ’Skins’. It will be missed by few.

               The Washingtonians’ move no doubt will spur examination of more of the above-mentioned names, all of which have been under some sort of fire. The baseball Cleveland Indians have said they are mulling a change, and the Atlanta Braves have indicated they may move to nix the tomahawk-motion cheer that has become their trademark. My alma mater, the U of Illinois, some years ago dropped its Chief Illiniwek symbol, after prolonged strife. Dumping the school’s Fighting Illini nickname has been urged by some, but that might also require changing the name of the state, which is of native-inhabitant origin. So too, by the way, are 25 other U.S. state names, 26 if you include Hawaii.

               One Amerind name that probably will hang on is that of the Florida State U. Seminoles. Since 1978 the schools’ mascots have been Osceola, a noted Seminole chief, and his appaloosa horse Renegade. Before every FSU home football game an Osceola impersonator rides Renegade onto the field and casts a burning spear into the ground around the 50-yard line. The names, and the capering, have the okay of the Seminole tribe, but that approval might stem in part from its gratitude that the school had dropped previous Indian mascots, among them Sammy Seminole, Chief Fullabull and Chief Wampumstompum.

The desire not to offend turns many athletic entities towards the zoo when it comes to naming or renaming, with results that are drearily generic. How far schools will go to avoid that pitfall is best exemplified by Stanford University, which in 1972 changed its teams’ name from the Indians to the Cardinal. That’s Cardinal singular, as in the color, not the bird. (Gotta watch them touchy bird lovers.) The school’s mascot runs around dressed as a tree. Who could object to that?

But Stanford aside, college team names generally have it all over those of the pros, probably because here are so many of them that some have to get it right. There are occupational names tied to the school’s mission, such as the Purdue Boilermakers and the Leigh Engineers, and ones with a meteorological tilt, like the Miami Hurricanes and Iowa State Cyclones. There are whimsical names like the Hampshire College Blacksheep, and neo-whimsical ones, such as the Cal-Irvine Anteaters and the mighty Artichokes of Scottsdale Community College in my AZ backyard. There are plays on words, like the Pace College Setters.

Usually, college cheers echo the institutions’ names, but sometimes the reverse has been true. Georgetown U. calls its teams the Hoyas after its “Hoya Saxa!” yell, a Greek-Latin amalgam that the school says translates to “what rocks!”  Virginia Polytechnic Institute dubs its teams the Hokies after a turn-of-the-20^th century chant that began “Hokey, hokey, hokey high/ Tech, Tech, VPI.”

Catholic-run Manhattan College names its teams the Jaspers after Brother Jasper, its first baseball coach. The University of Idaho’s Vandals nickname comes not from the ancient Germanic tribe but from a sportswriter’s exclamation that a long-ago school basketball team “vandalized” an opponent.

The origins of the University of North Carolina’s flavorful Tarheels nickname are lost in time. One version has it that state residents dumped tar into a river to impede British troops during the Revolutionary War, another has Civil War soldiers from the state telling detractors they would fight better if their heels also had been dipped in the plentiful gunk.  Indiana U.’s “Hoosiers” name is similarly obscure; it might stem from what early homesteaders in the state were said to have hollered when people knocked on their doors.

My favorite is the Billikens of St. Louis U. It seems that a billiken is an elfish, round-bellied statuary figure of Asian origin that used to be a popular good-luck charm. In 1910 a sportswriter decided that John Bender, the school’s football coach, looked like one and started calling the team “Bender’s Billikens.” The name stuck.

I have no expectation that Washington’s ownership will come up with anything clever or even interesting to replace Redskins. They’ve moaned publicly that a name change for an organization as august as theirs is no easy matter, requiring considerable thought and research. Executive brains must be taxed, focus groups convened. For the coming season (if there is one) the name “Washington Football Team” must suffice. Speculation has “Warriors” in the rename lead. Then it’s off to the zoo for “Red Wolves” and “Red Hawks,” although I read that somebody has copyrights on those names and would have to be paid off before they could be used

If the zoo it must be, I favor “Hogs.” Yeah, it has negative connotations, but it’s genuinely local, that being the team’s well known offensive-line nickname during its 1980s glory days. How about the “DisCos,” for a D.C. play? Or the “Lobbyists” or “Swamp Creatures” for a capital connection? If those don’t scare opponents, nothing will.