New York City Sports Ditty: December 2013

Alex Rodriguez and Barry Bonds

Witchhunt cons

Sold out tickets make us fond

Money bags

Pennant flags

Baseball's back!

on Sports Illustrated mags

Homerun chase

Time to contemplate

Adoring fans now say your a National Disgrace

Commissioner too

crying the Public Boo-Hoo

used the breaking of Aaron's record

to advertise his brew

No more dough

let's dull the glow

on this sordid Baseball Hypocrites Sideshow.

The headlines in New York City papers are adorned with Alex Rodriguez picture and a giant headline in big black ink that reads - AROD'S EVIL PLAN.

Apparently Mr. Rodriguez, known as A-Rod, who is rehabbing from a very serious hip injury, an injury which many believe will lead to early retirement, is plotting to play a few games after he comes back from Injured Reserve status, announce that he cannot perform anymore on his surgically reconstructed knee, and be eligible to collect his entire $114 million over the next five years.

Major League Baseball has a clause which states that a Major League Baseball player who is deemed physically unable to perform is allowed by baseball to retire and still collect his money.

Mr. Rodriguez will certainly be suspended by Major League Baseball due to his complicity in the latest doping scandal.

While there is mounting evidence that Mr. Rodriguez clandestinesly procured the services of Anthony Bosch, the founder of the now defunct Biogenesis, the South Florida clinic that allegedly supplied performance-enhancing drugs to Mr. Rodriguez, Ryan Braun, the Milwaukee Brewers MVP, and around 20 other big league players.

On Tuesday, Brian Cashman, the New York Yankees General Manager told Alex Rodriguez to "Shut the f--- up."

This was after Mr. Rodriguez tweeted he had been cleared to play by his personal surgeon Dr. Bryan Kelly.

Mr. Cashman came out on Wednesday and apologized for blowing up at Mr. Rodriguez telling reporters that there were discussions with Mr. Rodriguez and his reps earlier in the year about not making any public projections about any rehab or return dates.

That Mr. Rodriguez has sullied his reputation by his admitted use of steroids is clear, demeaning what had been an incredible baseball career, and jeopardizing surely his certain status as a future Hall of Famer, with his use of performance enhancing drugs.

Of this there is no doubt but The Appeal finds this whole sordid affair instructive on the ways of the Free Market Frankenstein Monster, it's sole reliance on profits, and the trashy avenues and dirty alleys that it travels.

Firstly, The Appeal remembers all of the excitement when "Baseball Is Back" posters were seen in every Stadium as Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa went on an unbelievable Home Run Competition that saw them both overtake the immortal Babe Ruth and Roger Maris's one season Home Run record.

A record that is amongst the most cherished in the game, leading to a record fan attendance year for Major League Baseball, and getting it back on track after going through a Labor strike the previous season, which necessitated ending the season mid-way through.

Baseball was ascendant again, coming back more quickly and effectively from the baseball strike, which had cost owners bucketloads of money, faster than anyone could have anticipated.

Many players, like Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa, both formerly slimmer looking and more agile, were starting to look like mini-Hulks in their baseball uniforms, with gigantic cartoonish arms and Popeye muscles bulging, as their heads seemingly doubled in size as well as their bodies.

Everyone in Major League Baseball, to include the owners, managers, coaches, sportswriters, players and fans knew that many of the players in Major League Baseball were taking steroids.

How could they not know?

The results of the immense changes on the players bodies and statistics were completely outsized and well received in an era when Arnold Schwarzenneger, the bodybuilder turned Hollywood actor, had made an enormous fortune on his Terminator, Conan The Barbarian and other Mucho Macho action on steroids films.

"I'll Be Back!" was Schwarzenneger's famous line and he surely was.

An American icon at the time who was seen by many as a sex symbol and proof positive of the American Dream, Schwarzwenneger went on to marry Maria Shriver of the Kennedy clan, and become Governor of California, and still to this day has a great deal of fan support as evidenced by his return to films, even after a messy divorce from Mrs. Shriver, after being caught in a public scandal, in which he had covered up siring a son with his nanny and housecleaner. Schwarzenneger was exposed by the tabloids after many years of hiding the truth and pretending it to not be so.

Back to Major League Baseball.

Bud Selig, the Commissioner of Baseball and himself an owner of the Milwaukee Brewers did not utter a peep about the obvious use of steroids by many of MLB players during those booming moneymaking years.

Why to the contrary!

Budweiser commercials were flashed time and again on every television set during the games as the American public was enthralled by the McGwire - Sosa Home Run chase.

Box office receipts, television advertising money, beer sales, and any and all other profit-making schemes that could be employed were cashing in at record levels at the heroic feats of the baseball sluggers.

The Home Run was back!

It was King! The symbol of the powerful American athlete.

Women were said to love Home Runs!

Sportswriters and announcers feigned surprise over magical transformations that saw amazing home run power surges from former players who had not previously shown an ability to hit the long ball.

Brady Anderson, a diminutive centerfielder with the Baltimore Orioles went from 5 homeruns to 54!

Of course no one in baseball said anything about the gorillas in their mist.

Why would they?

And SINK the gravy train that was filling all of the owners boats?

Of course at the same time, ticket prices, stadium parking, and concessions prices all went up.

Way up!

As well as teams taking their baseball games off of public television where you could see your hometown team for free.

Cable was the new way to go.

Why televise games when you could now make a bucketload of profit by making them only available through cable?

Loyalty and accomodation to your fans is a nice sentiment but it stands in the way of maximizing profits.

That is why you see the curious effect today in Yankee Stadium, and many other Stadiums around the league, where the fans at the playoff games are curiously quiet and seeming not as committed as years before?

That is because many of the seats now, the very best ones, are out of reach to the ordinary Joe Blow loyal fan, instead they are taken by corporations and the elite who have deals with the teams to buy up the best seats, of which only they can afford, so they can impress and hobknob with their fellow corporate high rollers.

Three years later came the Barry Bonds Home Run Chase.

The record that Mark McGwire had set tittilating fans and the media alike, which Roger Maris had held for years, after breaking Babe Ruth's long-held record , belting 70 home runs and beating out Sammy Sosa and shattering Roger Maris's record was not destined for a long shelf life.

It lasted for exactly THREE years.

As the record came under assault by the all-around great ballplayer Barry Bonds.

Bonds, another formerly slender athlete, and the nephew of Willie Mays, had ballooned up to an enormous size, once again setting the baseball world on fire, with his own monumental chase of the one season Home Run record, previously broken by Mark McGwire.

Bonds bested McGwire's previous year's record of 70 by racking up 77 dingers in front of cheering crowds and a fawning media.

Major League Baseball glorified Barry Bonds all the way up to his breaking of Henry Aaron's All-Time Major League Home Run Record in the following years.

Bonds starred in all kinds of advertisements, Budweiser beer commercials and fawning pre-game celebrations celebrating his illustrious Hall of Fame career.

Unimaginable sums of money was earned by Bonds and all of Major League Baseball and it's teams.

Owners pockets were overflowing.

Media and Corporate America exploited the situation to extract every dollar it could.

And why shouldn't they?

After extracting large sums ouf money out of adoring baseball fan's a strange thing happened. Somebody pulled the needle on the glorious money making music of The Steroid Era.

Then the music stopped!

A couple of years later after all the money had been counted.

Public sentiment started to turn.

Major League Baseball sensing the public relations disaster unfolding outlawed the use of performance enhancing drugs by its baseball players and enacted drug testing.

Barry Bonds, Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa, A-Rod and other famous ballplayers were called on to the carpet, to testify before Congress on their use of performance enhancing drugs.

Major League Baseball was said to be outraged and indignant over this damnation of steroids that had infected the very moral fibers of it's game.

But curiously there outrage had not surfaced during the incredible boom times of the Steroid Era?

Only after the music had stopped?

Going Back to Alex Rodriguez.

The New York Yankees, who had a new Stadium just recently built that was subsidized by New York City tax-payers, signed a contract with Mr. Rodriguez to extend his stay with the Yankee organization after his admission of being a steroid cheat. Rodriguez had come off of a wonderful playoff and World series performance.

The reason that they signed the exorbitant, more than $200 million dollar contract to pay Mr. Rodriguez, was because of the general feeling that he would still remain a top-notch player for the Yankees but mainly because he was chasing Barry Bonds recently broken Home Run record.

Bonds took over the most fabled record in baseball by breaking Henry Aaron's all-time carrer mark of 715. Aaron had seized the record with much fanfare from baseball immortal Babe Ruth.

This would put a lot of fannies in the seat they surmised.

Plus media attention.

Rodriguez Yankee jerseys and bats and the like were expected to be a monetary bonanza for the team!

They remembered the glory days of the Steroid Era.

The bucketloads of money that was made in the McGwire - Sosa Homerun Chase and Barry Bond's pursuit of Aaron's record.

Why shouldn't they cash in on Rodriguez?

They wanted Mr. Rodriguez and they were willing to bet big on him because there was an expected much huger payoff to be extracted from the All Time Home Run Chase.

Alas it was not to be.

Mr. Rodriguez hip injury and his recent involvement in yet another steroid scandal, medical doctors blame his long term use of steroids as a leading cause, has sabotaged his once promising career.

There is major doubt as to whether he can play again never mind him putting up the great baseball numbers that he was accustomed to acheiving.

Many medical doctors have said that it is almost certain that he will be forced to retire.

Thus is the real reason for the demonization of Mr. Rodriguez by the Yankees and it's cohorts in the New York daily newspapers.It is reminiscent of how corporations normally attack unions and it's workers.

Except union workers just go to work on a daily basis and do their jobs. Their is no need for them to take performance enhancing drugs.

Yet workers, similar to what the Yankees are doing to A-Rod, are demonized as greedy and corrupt and treated as disposable when the corporations feel as if they are hurting their bottom line or if they see a better chance to maximize their profits by getting rid of the workers.

Like moving operations to China and paying for a much cheaper labor force with no benefits which has the added benefit of escaping United States Labor laws and a "What Me Worry" response to the exploitation of these Chinese workers.

After a COLLECTIVE BARGAINING AGREEMENT is reached between managers of companies or city officials, and the union leaders, it is the workers who are invariably scapegoated as driving up prices and being inconsiderate to the companies or government locality's ability to book profits?

All we want to do is save money for our company or city?

What could be wrong with that?

Thus it never need be explained that workers have nothing at all to do with the collective bargaining agreements signed by company owners, government officials and union leaders?

The managers of corporations, companies and governments, who are primarily responsible for their organization's upkeep and well-being are never called out for their shoddy work.

It is always the greedy workers fault.

Workers just do their job.

Company officials and government officials work out the details of collective bargaining with the workers union leaders.

Yet time after time it is the workers who get demonized as "overpaid, lazy and get-overs."

In the overwhelming amount of cases where workers are demonized it is not their fault but piss poor management decisions that are the real culprit to cost over-runs.

This need not be defended by the companies, corporations or government officials doing the demonizing of the workers as through an overwhelming saturation of media reports and ads demonizing the workers, their accusations stand sufficiently to sway public opinion.

Who needs to look at management's performance?

Workers are outgunned or more precisely - out-dollared.The Appeal certainly does not condone any steroid cheats like Mr. Rodriguez or Barry Bond or anyone who goes outside of the moral boundaries to gain an unfair advantage.

Yet The Appeal strongly urges all to look at the real villains in this sordid hypocrites affair.For while using steroids is certainly something to be frowned upon and discredited, the New York Yankees organization was well aware of not only Mr. Rodriguez using steroids but many other players too.

They did sign Jose Canseco, after all, late in a playoff season because they thought he could win ballgames for them.

Mr. Rodriguez who would have been a certain Hall of Famer if he had never allowed himself to be drug into the seductive allure of steroids by all accounts has always carried himself on the field with the highest level of professionalism. He is no angel here, but neither is he a devil.

The fact of the matter is that everyone knew during the heyday of the Mcgwire - Sosa Homerun Chase - Baseball is Back! - days that there were many ballplayers using steroids.

The baseball commissioner, owners, managers, coaches, players, sportswriters, media and fans all knew.

Who stood up and stopped the money train then? Where was the indignity?

The Appeal's sense of moral indignity is entirely more inflamed by the double dealing, phony attempts at honorability, sleight of hand greedy boondoggle, dressed up in pure innocence pulled off by the owners and Commissioner of Major League Baseball exemplified by their lackeys, the sportswriters, like Mike Lupica of The Daily News, in their zealous attack to besmirch and criminalize their former moneybags ballplayers, Mr. Rodriguez and Mr. Bonds.

The Appeal plainly asks for fairness and a level playing field.

It is one thing to be a steroid cheat and quite another to be a moral fraud like Major League Baseball.

That puts on a Circus of Purity, a dog and pony show after profiting enormously from The Steroid Era, an era which everyone turned a blind eye to due to the enormous profits that were being booked.

The Steroids Era which saw Major League Baseball get off scot-free, owners and media and the league suffering no consequences at all and whose indignant cries of injustice at the players who were most instrumental in filling their coffers just a smoke screen intended to close the curtain on it's own sordid baseball hypocrite's affair.

Tuesday, December 31, 2013

Monday, December 30, 2013