The Ties That Bind

By Mike McGann
Posted Sunday, April 29, 2007

It boggles the mind. Shea Stadium served as the center of a $360 million gambling ring. Now, a former Mets’ batboy and clubhouse attendant, Kirk Radomski, pleads guilty to charges of money laundering and the sale of anabolic steroids.

Well, so much for rooting for the good guys. It’s getting to be a bit like rooting for the Sopranos in pinstripes (except, of course, they never wear pinstripes anymore). Bookies, drug dealers — one shivers at the thought of what’s next in the parade of Shea vice.

Now I know baseball has never been lilly white clean, going back to the old American Association New York Mets; gambling, cheating, throwing games, and whoring all have been part of the national past time since the 1870s at least. Since the same could be said about the U.S. government since even earlier than that, baseball’s naughty hijinks always seemed to get a wink and a smile.

But all of this should be a wake-up call for Mets’ fans. Until the last year or so, for all people knew, the Mets might have been incompetent, but they were honest. Evidently not; fans can clearly assume now that variously players were using performance enhancing substances, maybe even with a pipeline right into the clubhouse.

We shouldn’t be surprised, I suppose, even if most of us are.

We read newspapers and Websites supported by advertising dollars from bookies and betting touts (not this one, mind you — we’re among the small number of media outlets that thinks it’s a conflict of interest to take money from gambling touts, although our ad networks once in a while spool up an ad from local casinos in error, our net revenue from such sources amounts to less than dime in 2007), which helps put gambling right at baseball’s doorstep — despite rules that ban anyone taking money directly from gamblers or gambling interests from even stepping into a Major League clubhouse.

We have to bribe ushers at Shea to get decent seats; the good seats are filled with corporate types who wouldn’t know a squeeze play from a squeeze box and only show up when the team is winning and it is warm (but not hot) and sunny.

Baseball is dirty. Baseball has pretty much been dirty since that first game in Hoboken (the whole Cooperstown story, was actually a big lie, as Abner Doubleday had nothing to do with the creation of baseball). It’s a lie, wrapped inside a falsehood, surrounded by disinformation.

And here’s another reality: we root for laundry (heck, we root for laundry our team rarely wears). Most Mets’ fans are somewhere between toleration and hatred for team owner Fred Wilpon; the relationship is reciprocal, the Wilpons pretty clearly dislike Mets’ fans, based on how they treat them. The current stadium is a dump. The new stadium is a loving salute to a team that abandoned New York more than 50 years ago and is largely hated by the local baseball fan population, while completely ignoring the history of the team that’s supposed to be playing there.

The players — apparently Mets’, too — cheat and use all kinds of illegal drugs.

Yet, here we are, anguishing over David Wright’s struggles, debating the merits of the starting rotation and even having a lively discussion about the old days when RC Cola used to be sold at Shea.

Albert Einstein once said “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results” so one could argue that a lot of Mets’ fans are either insane or in denial. Or, maybe, they just don’t care.

Maybe none of this matters. Maybe we just filter out all of this stuff and continue to look at baseball, at the Mets, the same way we did when we were nine years old. Most of us played the game ourselves, probably badly, and none of us cheated, bet on games or even imagined the idea of groupies.

Somehow, we make the same assumptions about the players we root for.

Sure. There are bad guys, but they’re on other teams, we tell ourselves, knowing right away that it’s not true. But we manage to employ suspension of disbelief and keep rooting.

But how long will that last? Baseball is losing traction, being steamrolled by pro football, in part because too many people have looked behind the curtain and seen the reality of things. Only the essential magic of the game, the way it lends itself to poetry, keeps it from going the way of ice hockey.

But for how long?

Can baseball really continue for an extended period of time as baggy-pantsed criminal enterprise?

Probably.

Baseball fans and Mets’ fans are like people with cheating spouses who keep forgiving. “Next time,” they tell themselves, “next time, it will be different.” They see through love, not logic.

It’s like a collective madness — and people come to places like this to share their angst and pain, their hopes and fears. You wear your heart on your sleeve and it gets shredded time and again. And you come back for more.

In the end, baseball is about pain. Sharing it, worrying about it, celebrating the rare absence of it.

Despite all of this and more, baseball remains divinely imperfect and engaging. It’s the only sport that makes us all nine again.

You don’t want to love it, but you can’t help yourself.