ADDITION BY SUBTRACTION

                What are the elements of a successful marriage? I can’t say generally, but I can offer the example of myself and Susie, my dear wife of 32 years.  She likes it warm and I like it cool. She’s a pack rat and I can’t wait to throw things away. I think all food is created equal and she’s happiest nibbling on carrots and lettuce.

               Our twains diverge further when it comes to sports. In baseball she’s been flighty as a gnat, at one time or another being a devoted fan of the Detroit Tigers, L.A. Dodgers, Chicago White Sox and, now, the Arizona Diamondbacks. I’m as constant as the moon, rooting for the same Chicago teams as I did at age seven, despite also having lived in a number of other cities.  

                We’ve been Arizonans for 15 years, and I like the place fine, so my attitude toward the Phoenix pro teams puzzles even me. The only local club I’ve had any enthusiasm for was the basketball Suns during Steve Nash’s heyday, but while I enjoyed watching them play it didn’t bother me much when they lost.

                More seasons than not I’ve been downright hostile to the D’backs, failing to cheer their successes and gloating over their failures. I confess that that attitude stems in part from envy over their winning a World Series title in only their fourth year of existence in 2001, something my team, the Chicago Cubs, hadn’t done for 93 years to that point, and 104 years now. But I think it’s also been a reaction against the inattentive people who make up a large part of the Arizona fan base, folks who rarely rouse themselves to cheer the team on the field unless prompted to do so by the electronic scoreboard at Chase Field.

                Lots of times Susie and I have settled into our favorite upper-deck (cheap) seats at Chase, with empty seats fore and aft, only to have locals plop down in the row in front of us and hinder our view. We’ve learned not to bother moving because more often than not they’ll leave after a couple of innings, never to return.  Where they go I have no idea. A better question is why they came in the first place.

                Over the last few years, however, the D’backs have done a few things I’ve liked, and have turned my antipathy into neutrality. Lacking a “C” on their jerseys they’ll never supplant the Cubs or White Sox in my affections, but I can foresee a time when I’ll be at least a little pleased when they do well.  As Susie can attest, that’s big.

                The person who’s turned me around is Kevin Towers, the D’backs’ general manager since September, 2010. He’s not only savvy baseballwise but is a standup guy as well, one of the few MLB execs who’d frankly discuss steroids use in the game during the 1990-2005 HITS Era (for Heads In The Sand), when juiced players were jacking juiced balls out of parks at a mockery-making rate and the official word on the subject was mum. The fallout from that span will always stain the sport, stamping a permanent asterisk on the records of the period.

                Towers made his bones generally managing the San Diego Padres, achieving four divisional titles and a World Series appearance (in 1998) in a city that’s as indifferent toward baseball as is Phoenix. In one of his first moves here he captured my attention, trading away Mark Reynolds, then the team’s posterboy.

                What made that deal wasn’t the guy Arizona got (David Hernandez, a useful relief pitcher) but the guy it got rid of. Reynolds best exemplified the D’backs of the new century’s first decade, a dumb slugger who hacked for the fences each time up but connected mostly with air. His 223 strikeouts in 2009 was a Major League record, breaking his own mark (204) of the year before. 

                More offputing yet was the attitude behind all those Ks; when asked about his propensity to whiff Reynolds always answered “that’s my style,” as if baseball were an individual game.  His negligent play at third base rounded out his zero persona.

                Although Towers got little credit for it hereabouts, he accomplished a small miracle in 2011, building a bullpen from scratch and turning a 65-97 team into one that went 94-68 and won a divisional crown.  A lot of luck went into that record, and it wasn’t repeated during last year’s 81-81 finish that more accurately reflected the team’s talent level.  Towers recognized this and completed the housecleaning that he’d begun two years earlier, sweeping out center-fielder Chris Young and right-fielder Justin Upton, two more players cut in the Reynolds mold.    

                The dumping of Upton was especially controversial; the team had made the young man the first choice in the 2005 draft and he’d intermittently flashed superstar gifts, sending drives into the darkest recesses of industrial-looking Chase. Mostly, though, he looked distracted, and Towers reasoned that it no longer was useful betting big money that he’d shape up.

                The players Towers has added—mainly second-baseman Aaron Hill; third-baseman Martin Prado, who came from Atlanta in the Upton trade; and right-fielder Cody Ross-- aren’t light-up-the-sky types. One writer for the Arizona Republic called them “white hot” competitors fanatical about winning, but that was silly because baseball is a game of adjustment and reaction and any player who burned white would quickly turn into a cinder. But they do look like adult pros who’ll show up to play every day, a welcome change in these parts.

                I don’t know how Arizona will do this season. They share a division with the San Francisco Giants, who’ve won two of the last three World Series, and the refinanced Dodgers and their $200 million payroll.  Baseball is mostly about pitching and the D’backs’ is iffy, especially the starters.  They should be out there trying, though, and I could get behind that.

MANTI AND CALEB

                

The common wisdom had it that the Wall Street Journal, my estimable former employer, hired as reporters people steeped in financial knowledge, the better to negotiate the subject’s complexities. The common wisdom was wrong.

               

             I was Exhibit A in that regard. I don’t know what the paper is doing now, but when I was signed on in 1963 as a 25-year-old I was as green as they came businesswise, not knowing a stock from a bond. When I expressed anxiety about my deficiencies I was told not to worry, that if I kept my eyes and ears open I’d pick up what I needed.

 Business and finance were merely “subject matter,” a senior colleague assured me then, and no harder to learn than any of the myriad other things journalists are called upon to cover. If one has the reportorial essentials—mainly curiosity, a low tolerance for B.S. and a willingness to pester people with unwelcome questions—the world would yield up its mysteries, or at least some of them, he said.

He was right and I happily spent years as a general-assignment reporter, writing about subjects as varied as business (of course), education, high fashion and theoretical physics. When I turned my hand to fulltime sports columnizing beginning in 1983 I felt no qualms about competing with men who had far more seniority than I on my new beat. Sports, after all, were just another subject, and in many ways not much different from what I’d been doing. Indeed, on some of the stories I dealt with, I thought my broad background gave me a leg up against people whose main concern always had been with who was on, or in, first.

A couple such stories have been in the news in recent weeks, and although they’ve been covered mostly on the sports pages they really weren’t about sports.  I refer to the ones involving Manti Te’o, the Notre Dame football hero with the dead imaginary girlfriend, and Caleb Moore, the snowmobiler whose death in an ESPN “X Games” stunt enthralled and appalled television viewers. Both were more about human nature and the way we live than about wins, losses or anything else that usually takes place on our fields of play. As such, they’ve pretty much been butchered by the people who’ve spoken or written about them.

For sheer strangeness, few recent stories have topped that of Te’o.  It seems that the Hawaiian linebacker carried on a two-year online and telephonic affair with an island woman whom he came to regard as his girlfriend even though they’d never met. When he was told she’d died of leukemia on the same day last September as did his grandmother he duly informed news-media folk, and earned props for soldiering on in the face of adversity.  That narrative gave a push to his strong Heisman Award candidacy, the first for a Domer in many years.

It turned out that the girlfriend never lived—that she was the invention of a warped, male “family friend” of Te’o’s who’d spoken and typed her lines-- but after he learned this Te’o kept it to himself as Heisman announcement day came and went. Thus, when the hoax became public he was vilified. Indeed, for a couple of weeks last month you couldn’t open a newspaper or turn on a TV set without hearing him mocked and denounced, and in a national poll by the website of the business magazine Forbes, which probably should concern itself with more-serious matters, he was voted the second “most disliked” American athlete, behind only the serial cheater and liar Lance Armstrong.

My first reaction to the flap was that it was wildly overblown, that while Te’o was an imposing lump of muscle he also was a young man of 22 subject to all the limitations of his tender years. I certainly wouldn’t like to see all the dumb things I did and said at 22 (or later) broadcast coast-to-coast. Further, his failure to leap to set the record straight about the matter is easily ascribable to his reluctance to look the fool. My guess is that he thought that if he kept his mouth shut the thing would go away, an error he’s shared with many older celebrities including a President or two. Give the kid a break, for chrissakes!

Upon reflection, however, I began to wonder how unusual was the crux of the story, which was that someone could become so enmeshed in a so-called “virtual” relationship that he could come to regard it as real.  This, after all, is the digital age, when people boast they have hundreds of online “friends” even though they’ve never met most of them, and when it’s not uncommon to see a group of people sitting together around a restaurant table totally engrossed in their own, hand-held electronic devices.

One of my pet peeves is being waited on in a store and having the salesperson be diverted by a phone call and transferring his or her entire attention to the caller.  To some, any jangling phone or streaming text line is more compelling than a live human being, no matter how close. Fess up--you may be one of them.

 Caleb Moore’s tale was, of course, more tragic than Te’o’s, but no less misinterpreted. It was treated widely as an anomaly—something that’s unexpected and out of place.  In fact, the kind of mishap that killed him was the logical consequence of his activity and inevitably will occur again.

Further, and more importantly, daredevilry is not the exclusive province of such high-risk sports as auto and motorcycle racing, downhill skiing and the entire “X Games” schedule (the “X” is short for “extreme,” as in “extremely dangerous”) but is evidenced more often in the ordinary work of the likes of police officers, fire fighters and combat soldiers, occupations pursued by millions. When most people hear gunfire they run away from it, but the cop or soldier runs toward it.  Good thing, too; such people are necessary for our protection individually and as a society.

   That risk seekers are different from you and me is obvious, but for reasons rarely investigated. Something I once read explains it nicely: they are anhedonic, which means they’re unable to experience pleasure in ordinary ways.  While most people find ample delight in, say, a ballgame or a corned beef sandwich, for psychological or chemical reasons others need a real kick to get their juices flowing. This, by the way, also explains why people will take up with dangerous recreational drugs with the full knowledge that they could be their downfall.

 A daredevil like the 25-year-old Moore does what he does because of the danger involved, not in spite of it. He said as much in an interview with the New York Times given shortly before his crash. Recalling the first time he did the fatal stunt as a 19-year-old, a full backflip off a ramp on a 500-pound machine, he said “it was the most exciting moment of my life¸ and the most heart-pounding, too.”

Minutes after Caleb Moore’s accident—while he was en route to the hospital—his 23-year-old brother Colton, also an “X Games” snowmobiler, tried the same trick on the same ramp. He wound up in the hospital with a separated pelvis. Released a day later, after Caleb had died, Colton said he’d be back in action as soon as he was able.

  

  

 

                 

                

OLD FART, OR JUST OLD?

            

I’m scheduled to turn 75 years of age tomorrow (Feb. 2) and must say I’m kind of surprised because there hasn’t been much longevity in my family. That I’ve already outlived my dear father by 15 years has been a source of conjecture for me of late. I mean, if we meet in heaven (or someplace), will I be older than he is?  It could be awkward.

           

            People talk about “milestone” ages—usually ones ending in “0” or “5”-- and 75 certainly seems like one of those. Thanks mostly to near-miraculous good health, the passage of time so far hasn’t affected me unduly. Only one other birthday made much of an impression, when I turned 45 and realized that I was seriously middle-aged. But I was too busy then to give the matter much more thought and my concern passed.

            While it’s true that you’re only young once but can always be immature, when one reaches 75 one no longer can pretend to be anything but old. The Bible measures a full life’s span at three score and 10 years, and 75 is well past that. Talk about borrowed time, huh?   

             But while growing old is unavoidable except by drastic measures, some choices remain to us elderly; to wit, we can opt to be just old, or to be an old fart. What do I mean by old fart? Some examples are listed below. You know you’re an old fart when:

           

--You drive a Cadillac, Lincoln or Buick.

           

--You can’t turn right without coming to a complete stop.

           

--You won’t turn left until the green arrow goes on, whether or not there’s one at the intersection.

--You drive for miles with a turn-signal blinking.

--You wear cream-colored shoes with Velcro straps, or a Greek fisherman’s cap.

           

--You wear shorts with your socks pulled up all the way.

--You have more hair below your silly pony tail than you do above it.

--You think an earring or two looks cool on a guy your age.

--You ask your wife if she feels like making love and are relieved when she says no.

           

--You’re turning up the volume on the TV set when everyone else in the room is reaching for ear plugs.

           

--You have no idea who Lady Gaga is.

           

--You can’t survive without having dinner before 6 p.m. or being in bed by 9.

           

--You go to COSTCO just to eat lunch.

           

--The right word escapes you and doesn’t return until the opportunity to use it has passed.

           

--The sort of people you used to pass on the trail now pass you and ask if you’re OK.

           

--You think more about the hereafter. For instance, you often find yourself in a room asking “What am I here after?”

           

--Your idea is being daring is adding an extra forkful of mayonnaise to your tuna salad.

           

--Your idea of a big night out is dinner at Sweet Tomatoes.

--You contemplate a trip and the anticipated ordeal of travel scores higher than the pleasure of your destination.

--Seventy five per cent of your conversation concerns your doctors and medications. The other 25% is about other people’s health problems.

           

--You remember who Ransom Jackson was but block on Starlin Castro.

           

            --Plotting the accessibility of rest rooms becomes a major part of your daily plan.

            --You’re mad as hell about the government takeover of Medicare.

            --You enjoy complaining that you remember when “gay” meant happy.

            You’re an old fart if you recognized yourself in five or more of those statements.

OK, ten.

           

            What was my score? I’m not sayin’, but it wasn’t zero.

HOCKEY SHMOCKEY

 Every Friday during the football season a guy calls his book maker and places a bunch of bets on the weekend’s games. Every week he loses 60, 70, 80 per cent of the time.

One January Friday he calls his bookie as usual and asks for the football line.  The bookie laughs.  “Football season is over,” he says. “It’s hockey season now.  I’ll give you the hockey line.”

“I don’t bet on hockey,” says the bettor. “I don’t know anything about it.”

I don’t know much about hockey either, and my ignorance is intentional. Long ago I was a fan of the sport—and for a couple of years I covered the University of Michigan’s team for the dearly departed Ann Arbor News—but kicked the habit. That’s why the news that the National Hockey League soon will begin another truncated season leaves me cold. I wouldn’t cross the street to see a hockey game, especially an icy street.

I must confess that my first stirrings of antipathy for the sport stemmed from pique. As a youth I followed the Chicago Blackhawks—partly because I thought their Indian-head jerseys were the coolest ever—and for a few years after my return to Chicago in 1969 after a decade of wandering I held a piece of a Hawks’ season ticket. Those were the Bobby Hull-Stan Mikita days, when the Hawks rode high (although never quite high enough), and I thrilled to their exploits. One of my most-memorable sports moments came when Hull scored in overtime to beat the New York Rangers in a Stanley Cup playoff game. The cheer after that one almost tore the roof off old Chicago Stadium.

The Hawks, however, were owned by Arthur Wirtz, as greedy a man who ever lived. Every year he raised the price of everything within his domain, betting that hockey’s allure would keep the suckers coming. I gulped and reuped until 1972, when Wirtz allowed the great Hull, one of Chicago’s all-time sports heroes, to jump to the new World Hockey Association for an annual salary ($100,000) that looked large then but soon would be regarded as a pittance. I took my ticket business to the basketball Bulls, where it would stay until 1994. Then Jerry Reinsdorf pulled a Wirtz when he moved the team into the vast, new United Center and more than doubled the price of my seats for ones with a worse view. When my fanhood bumps against my cheapness the latter wins, and I watched on TV from there on.

My dislike of the Hawks deepened with the years. Arthur Wirtz died in 1983 and bequeathed his empire to his idiot son, Bill.  Arthur was called “The Baron of the Bottom Line,” in tribute to his rapaciousness. Bill’s nickname was “The Commodore,” because he liked to tool around on his yacht, thinking up new ways to shortchange his team’s fans. When Bill’s Blackhawks went south on the ice in the 1990s, and attendance plunged, I smiled. I also smiled when the team rebounded under Bill’s son, Rocky, and claimed a rare Stanley Cup in 2010, but not nearly as much as I would have for a similar triumph by any other Chicago team.      

  Still, part of my gripe against hockey is institutional. The NHL is permanently overexpanded, its reach far exceeding its grasp. True, the six founding teams that made it almost through the 1960s (representing New York, Chicago, Boston, Detroit, Montreal and Toronto) were too few, but the 14 that entered the 1970s seemed to me about right. Alas, franchises have been awarded to any town with a rink and there are 30 now , far too many to be supported by the sport’s narrow, frosty-land players’ base. The result is all too obvious on the ice.

 There’s too much NHL for the sports pages, too; even casual fans should be able to identify the nicknames of all the teams in our major leagues, but do you know what cities the Blue Jackets, Wild, Predators, Hurricanes, Lightning and Panthers represent? You get a gold star if you do. Answers are at the end of this column.

One might think that the fourth sport in a three-sport environment would strive to make nice with its fans, but the NHL does the opposite. Its labor relations have been rancorous even by sports standards, with the latest lockout its third lengthy work stoppage in the last 17 years. One of those, in 2004-5, cancelled a whole season, for heaven’s sake.  Absence may make the heart grow fonder in matters romantic, but in sports it breeds only apathy. That could be especially hurtful for a league that has, maybe, 15,000 real supporters in most cities in which it operates.

   Worst of all, hockey deserves no respect because it does not respect itself. I refer to its toleration of fighting. Players fight in other sports, too, but receive expulsions, suspensions and fines when they do. In hockey it’s a few minutes in a penalty box and back on the ice.

 Hockey is a perfectly good game, and the skills of its better players are marvelous. College hockey exists nicely without brawling and every four years the best of the NHL players stage a thrilling tournament in the Olympics while keeping their hands to themselves. But the people who run the league don’t trust that, and feel they must appeal to their most-ignorant fans to succeed. They get what they deserve with their perennial bring-up-the-rear status.

QUIZ ANSWERS:  It’s the Columbus Blue Jackets, Minnesota (St. Paul) Wild, Nashville Predators, Carolina (Raleigh) Hurricanes, Tampa Bay Lightning and Florida (Sunrise) Panthers.

 

ME AND N.D.

                There’s a book titled “All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten,” and although I never read it I pretty much endorse the statement. Certainly, I recognize that many of the certainties rattling around in my head today are reflexive, there since childhood.

               

              I don’t, however, rule out the possibility of personal growth, and have a couple of sports examples to prove it. One is my attitude toward the New York Yankees. I spent most of my life hating them because I’m from Chicago, whose teams almost never win anything, while the godalmighty Bronx Bombers win everything in sight. How could I feel different?

                But as a sportswriter I spent some time around Joe Torre, the Yanks’ manager from 1996 through 2007, and found him to be a pleasant and reasonable man, so I didn’t mind it when his teams won championships during that span. I feel the same way about Joe Girardi, their current manager, whom I met when he played for the Cubs. I’m not a Yankees’ fan, but I don’t wish them bad luck any more.

                My relationship with the University of Notre Dame’s athletic teams is similar but a bit more complicated. I grew up on Paulina Street near Leland Avenue on the Windy City’s North Side, around the corner from Our Lady of Lourdes Church, the only Jewish kid within shouting distance and not nearly the toughest.  Some of my pals, and most of my non-pals, were Notre Dame fans, and their constant bleating about the school’s football team became intolerable. When their boasting reached a crescendo the week before the 1946 game between Notre Dame and Army—one of those games-of-the-century that crop up every few years-- I felt moved to put them in their places by betting on Army. This was despite the fact that I’d never seen adults play football except in newsreels.

                If the gesture made the eight-year-old me feel good, the feeling was fleeting. It quickly became apparent that one of two things probably would happen: I’d lose the bets and have to pay, which I couldn’t because the sums involved well exceeded my net worth of less than a buck, or I’d win and have to try to collect, a process likely to yield more bruises than cash. Either way, I was screwed.

                 Those were radio days, and I tuned into the game with a sense of foreboding. Back and forth the two sides heaved, and my stomach with them. The game ended in a 0-0 tie, which everybody said suited nobody, but as usual everybody was wrong. It suited me fine, providentially so.

                One upshot of the experience was positive: I never again “bet the rent” on a game or horse race. The other was an abiding dislike of Notre Dame, which against reason I decided was generally odious. I maintained that posture for decades despite the fact that it mostly caused me pain as the erstwhile Irish went from success to success, but that’s the way those things usually work.

                My views on ND changed in 1981 when it named Gerry Faust as its new football head coach. I’d met Gerry a few years before when I witnessed and wrote about one of his appearances as a motivational speaker, before an audience of IBM salespeople. Businessmen respond to the metaphors of sport so it’s not uncommon for sport figures to address them, but usually these are men or women with national reputations. Faust at the time was the coach at Moeller High School in Cincinnati, and while highly successful was anything but a household name.  IBM was a sophisticated company and I wondered how an obscure prepster would go over with such a crowd.

                    Great was how. Not polished but deeply sincere and emotionally tuned in, he had the IBMers on their feet at the end, roaring and eager to overcome whatever challenges might lie ahead. They all but carried him out of the hall in triumph.

                I got a nice note from Gerry after my piece ran, and we stayed in touch. When my late wife was ill he sent flowers.  He sent another note of thanks when he got the Notre Dame job, and I followed up with a couple of columns on his progress there. Alas, Gerry was a hand-out-the-towels sort who never adapted to the demands of a being CEO of a major-college football program, and was fired after five seasons despite a winning record (30-26-1) in South Bend. But having rooted for him I thereafter was unable to work up my old animosity toward the Domers.

                Notre Dame football has had a couple of bad decades of late, but this season was reborn under coach Brian Kelly, and on Monday night (Jan. 7) will play Alabama in the BCS National Championship game. The scrappy Irish are an easy team to like, undefeated but not one of those soulless college powerhouses that thrive by stomping lesser foes.  Alabama is from the Southeastern Conference, a collection of institutions that exist mainly to field football teams. My rooting choice on Monday might seem clear.

                Unfortunately, it’s not that simple. Notre Dame continues to grate because its “we do things right” pose is contradicted by such recent-year incidents as its coverup of rape allegations against a football player and the death of a student manager who was sent up on a cherry-picker in a windstorm to videotape a football practice.  What were those people thinking?!

                So I will watch the game with neutrality, but I say that proudly. It’s part of the scant evidence that I’ve matured since kindergarten. 

               

                 

                 

               

                

CLUCK CLUCK

If you’ve heard clucking sounds as you’ve gone about your rounds of late, don’t be alarmed. It’s probably just some of baseball’s chickens coming home to roost during sportswriter voting in the Baseball Hall of Fame’s 2013 election.

            

            Ordinarily the vote would be occasion for celebration, especially this year with Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens and Sammy Sosa on the ballot for the first time.  Bonds was far and away the best batsman of his time and Clemens was, maybe, the best pitcher. Sosa was the best hitter in the long and rich (but, alas, trophy-short) history of the Chicago Cubs.  Based on their stats each would be a shoo-in for the Hall, the unanimous or near-unanimous choice of adoring scribes. There hasn’t been such a stellar candidate class in years.

            

           What we’ve got instead, though, is a debate about the suitability of the three for a place among their sport’s immortals.  Substantial evidence has linked each to the use of performance-enhancing drugs during their seasons of greatest productivity, drugs that were and are illegal without prescriptions and banned by baseball’s rules. Their accomplishments have been called into question, as have their characters. It’s not pretty from any angle.

            

           Baseball’s overseers have no one but themselves to blame for this. From the early 1990s until 2005—a period I call the HITS (for “Heads In The Sand”) Era-- they closed their eyes to the steroids use that warped their game on the field and in the record books. Their blindness was willful; after Associated Press reporter Steve Wilstein spotted a hormone-laced dietary supplement on an open shelf in Mark McGwire’s St. Louis Cardinals’ locker during his 70-home-run drive in 1998, no one could claim he didn’t know what was going on, but seven more years passed before real tests were instituted. ”Chicks love the long ball,” was the mantra of the day, but team owners and the players-union’s leaders loved it more.

 Indeed, their devotion amounted to an addiction, and now it’s up to the 600 or so present or former baseball writers who form the Hall of Fame elector group to sort out the fallout from the habit. I’m one of them.

 So far, the verdict has been clear: cheaters have no place on the plaque wall in the Cooperstown shrine. Exhibits A and B for this have been the fate of known dopers McGwire (by his own belated admission) and Rafael Palmeiro, who failed a drug test in 2005 just months after testifying to Congress than he never used. Both have ample H of F credentials but in their combined eight years on the ballot neither has come close to reaching the 75% vote needed for induction. McGwire topped out at 23.7% in 2010, Palmeiro at 12.6% last year.

One argument for admitting the dope-connected to the Hall is that everyone was doing it when they played. From the evidence I’ve seen that’s not true; when I was a locker-room regular during HITS I asked more than a few executives, managers and veteran players for their confidential estimates of player drug use, and most put it at about one third.  The other argument—raised strongest in the cases of Bonds, Clemens and Sosa—is that they were so good they deserve entry anyway, but by me that’s unprovable and therefore unconvincing.

In baseball there’s cheating and cheating, and theirs was the wrong sort. It’s one thing for a fielder who traps a fly ball to raise it in triumph as though he’d made a catch, it’s quite another to cold-bloodedly weigh risks and rewards and choose to shoot up. Bonds, Clemens and Sosa all were richly rewarded for their decisions (each was paid between $15 million and $19 million a year in the latter stages of their very lucrative careers), and no one is asking for a refund or trying to erase their records. But no one has a right to a perfect life, and now a bill is coming due.

So I won’t be voting for the three this time around and, apparently, neither will most of my colleagues; in an AP poll of Hall electors two weeks ago (I wasn’t asked), just 48% said they’d include Bonds on their ballots, 43% said they’d list Clemens and 18% yessed Sosa. If that’s as accurate as the presidential-election polls, none of the three will be making an induction speech in July.

 They’re not the only ones on the ballot, though, and this year’s field has extraordinarily depth. I’ll be voting for three first-time listees: Craig Biggio, Mike Piazza and Curt Schilling. Biggio was a gritty little guy who topped the magic 3,000-hits mark in his 20-season Houston Astros’ career while winning Golden Gloves at second base. Piazza was among the best-hitting catchers ever whose 396 home runs (of his 427) is a record for someone at the testing position. Schilling’s 3,116 career strikeouts are 15^th on the all-time list and he had a 60% regular-season winning percentage (216-146). What’s more, he was brilliant in the post-season, where he posted an 11-2 record and 2.23 ERA in 19 starts.

We can put up to 10 names on our ballots and I’ll be adding four I’ve voted for previously: Edgar Martinez, the best DH so far; Lee Smith, a relief-pitching nonpareil; Alan Trammell, a brilliant shortstop over a 20-year career; and Jack Morris, the former Tigers’ and Twins’ pitching ace.

I’ll be rooting especially for Morris, in his 14^th year on the ballot, who should have been enshrined already. His win total (254) is higher than Schilling’s, and is his proportion of wins (57%) is almost as good. He also was a great big-game pitcher whose 10-inning shutout for the Twins over the Braves in the seventh game of the 1991 World Series was one of the best performances I ever saw.

Also, the old-school Morris had his best years before widespread steroids use and, thus, can safely be considered to have played “clean.” That’s more than can be said for any latter-day star, even the ones I voted for. Maybe the worst thing about HITS is that it put a cloud over everyone who played during the era.  That ought to cost some people at least a few nights’ sleep.

LABOR PAINS

                For most of my working life-- the 38 years I spent with the Wall Street Journal—I was a union member, first with the independent union that represented only Journal people and later with the national Communications Workers of America. The WSJ (Dow Jones & Co., actually) was a good place to work but it was a large company, with thousands of employees, and many times I was glad I had something bigger than me to represent my interests.

The recent decline in union membership in this land is sad, I think. Without such a buffer, many employers have been emboldened to demand 24/7 devotion from the people they hire while giving back little in the way of loyalty or security. In today’s lucky-to-have-a-job economy, the sign above the door over the typical workplace reads “like it or lump it.”  That’s not a good thing for the 99%.

One realm in which unions not only have survived but flourished, though, is big-time professional sports.  It took the athletes a long time to realize it, but their irreplaceable gifts and skills give them the sort of bargaining power others only can envy, and since they finally hired leaders astute enough to wield it-- most notably Marvin Miller, the ex-baseball-union head who died last week at age 95—they’ve prospered beyond their own or anyone else’s wildest dreams.

In 1967, the year before the Major League baseball union negotiated its first collective-bargaining agreement with the owners, the game’s annual minimum salary stood at $6,000. Today it’s $480,000. The comparable numbers in the National Football League are $7,000 and $390,000. Those gains are records not only for this planet but, I’m sure, also for any others in the universe that might be inhabited.  Any young man who lasts two or three seasons in either sport’s bigs—scrub or star -- will earn more than his father probably will in a lifetime.  Boggles the mind, doesn’t it?

But as successful as the sports unions have been at the bank, they’ve let down their members badly in other ways. Indeed, their single-minded focus on the paycheck has been the cause of the sort of short-sightedness that endangers the players’ enjoyment of their riches.

The baseball union’s main failing was its handling of the use of the performance-enhancing drugs (anabolic steroids, mostly) that shaped their sport for a 15-year period (1990-2005).  Baseball’s rules preluded use of the substances for that entire span, but the ban was toothless because of the game’s failure to implement any sort of effective testing procedures until ‘05. Team owners closed their eyes to the situation because they feared that exposing it might hurt their teams at the gate. The union went along with the charade, declaring drug use a “privacy” issue.

Of the two stances, the owners’ made the most sense; they are, after all, in it only for the money. The union, however, had the additional duty to protect its members’ overall well being, and its complicity forced each player to make the Faustian choice between the possible performance rewards of drug use and the small but real health risks the substances posed, either directly or by exacerbating other conditions. That a wrong decision could be tragic is witnessed by the death of Ken Caminiti, in 2004 at age 41, eight years after his steroids-fueled National League MVP season. The full bill has yet to arrive.    

The NFL Players Association is flunking a similar test in its handling of the player-safety issues that have dominated the sport’s headlines the past couple seasons. When the league uncovered the New Orleans Saints’ appalling bounty scandal last spring, and slapped suspensions on several Saints’ coaches and defensive players (including season-long sentences for head coach Sean Payton and linebacker Jonathan Vilma, who was alleged to have put up money for the aim-to-maim hits), the union sprang into action-- not on behalf of the victims of the scheme but the player perps, getting Vilma’s sentence reduced and supplying lawyers for three other Saints who are contesting their penalties in Federal court.  The players contend that league hearing practices violate their rights, and while I’m a big a due-process fan it would have been nice to hear their union express some concern for the players those guys targeted.

Worse yet as been the union’s championing of the perpetrators of the sort of helmet-to-helmet hits that are the prime cause of the concussions epidemic that poses an existential threat to the sport. The latest of these is the Baltimore Ravens’ safety Ed Reed, a serial headhunter who’s been cited for such offenses three times in as many seasons. Reed was handed a one-game suspension for his smackdown of Pittsburgh Steelers’ receiver Emmanuel Sanders in a November 18 game, but with union help Reed got the penalty reduced to a fine that will keep him on the field while saving him almost $400,000.

 The hit in question took place in the open for all to see--you can check it out online. Nothing about it recommends mitigation. If it’s not worth a suspension, nothing is. Maybe that’s the point.

          Fact is, the concussions problem in football is dire and despite pious rhetoric is getting worse at all levels. Former players are lined up by the hundreds to sue the NFL, charging it did little to prevent head injuries in past years and downplayed their significance once they occurred.  Sensible moms and dads are telling their sons to take up soccer instead. One would think the players’ union would be up in arms, screaming for rules that might allow more of its members to work crosswords puzzles when they’re 40 (like one banning head shots, on penalty of expulsion). Instead it protects the miscreants, making a bad situation worse.

 If I were an NFL player I’d demand a dues refund.

And hire a good lawyer.