Your Cheatin' (Baseball) Heart...

Everybody cheats...right? You bet your britches, crib sheet breath! Nobody drives the speed limit...except for the lady talking on her cell phone and applying lipstick driving 35 mph miles in the fast lane in the pouring rain on MOPAC this afternoon. And apparently nobody in baseball takes seriously the notion that there should be a level playing field regarding the cheating of mother nature's DNA diaper when it comes to being able to hit or throw a baseball. Oh, we who are artisans, suitors and aficionados of the gentler national pastime have thumbed our noses at the bruisers who 'roid up to smack heads in football, smack down in professional wrestling, or even smack very rapidly when it comes to track and field. Never mind the Black Sox scandal of '29(poor Shoeless Joe), the shameless abuse both Maris and Aaron took when they overtook the legends that preceded them in the career homerun totals, the Pete Rose betting scandal, sign stealing, pine tar and corked bat accusations, not to mention my favorite cheating ploy of all...the spitball. So the Mitchell Report on steroid and HGH use in Major League Baseball that was released to the public yesterday, not only pointed the finger at most of the usual subjects we expected like, Rafi Palmero, Jose Canseco, Gary Sheffield and Barry Bonds...there were also a few startling ones like Roger Clemens and Andy Pettit. Say it ain't so Rocket! So will Roger end up with an asterisk by his name in the record books just like Barry, or will he find a way to prove his innocence and clear his name? The jury is still out on that and the impact this will have on baseball.

I think about the way I was taught to play the game by one of my heroes, my high school baseball coach, Willis Stelly. I remember a preseason game my junior year when we had packed up in the Glen Oaks High School Panthers team bus (it was a 20 year old school bus painted white red and black) early one Saturday morning and drove the 65 miles down old US Highway 190 to Lafayette to play the Sub-varsity team from the USL (University of Southwestern Louisiana...now called University of Louisiana at Lafayette) Rajun Cajuns. In those days freshman were prohibited from playing varsity sports so colleges created these sub-varsity and freshman teams to give them playing time...we were punk high school kids, but we had recently won a state championship so we had a pretty good reputation, and good games were hard to come by for these guys, so it was a win-win situation...they got another game against live pitching and we got to play against college level competition before we started our district schedule against other high school teams. The truth...we rarely lost to these teams...We were well coached and were usually underestimated, for good reason, but in my high school career as a starter at Glen Oaks we lost only once out of 7 games. One year we beat Nicolls State College in Thibidoux, the spring before they were the NCAA Division II College World Series runners up...but that is a story for another day. That Saturday in February, we loaded the bus and made the trek to USL. We ran out several pitchers that day, but they all threw well and we jumped out to a 3-1 lead on a series of clutch hits in key situations (none by me, but the way). USL closed to 3-2 in the 6th (we played 7 innings)and we came up for our turn to hit in the top of the 7th inning. I was scheduled to hit second in the inning. Our leadoff hitter fanned on 4 pitches and the tall, lanky southpaw got ahead of me 0-2 on two scorching fastballs. He made the mistake of trying to fool me with a change-up...he should have known that I was seriously overmatched with his speed and he could just put me away with another fastball. Instead, he tried to get cute, and I banged the change-up into left field for a clean single. I was not terribly fast but I was a smart baserunner, so on the second pitch I gambled thinking that this college catcher with a gun for an arm would love to show off that arm by picking off the foolish high school kid who carelessly wandered too far off of first between pitches. The delayed steal was something we had been taught for such an occasion, and I took a walking lead as my teammate took a called strike. As the ball hit the catcher's mitt I made eye contact with the catcher, feigned a panicked look as he whirled and blazed the ball down to first. The only problem for them was that when I saw that he had committed to throw to first I took off for second and the relay throw from the first baseman to the shortstop covering was late...I had a stolen base. The pitcher lost his composure a little and walked the batter on four straight pitches. Our next batter looking for a fat pitch, jumped on a fastball down the pipe, but was a little out front and hit a two-hopper to the third baseman who fielded the ball cleanly, took two steps to touch third and then pivoted to make a throw to first for an inning ending double play. We had been taught to cleanly breakup double plays at second by sliding hard into the pivot man at second...no spikes, no dirty stuff, just a clean hard slide with the shin up to knock him off his feet or make him leap, disrupt his throw and keep him from completing the double play. As the third baseman gloved the grounder and stepped on third, I was sliding into the base to do what I always did at second...break up the double play...I toppled the third baseman, he never got rid of the ball and the runner at first was safe. I got up to get a high five from my coach when I saw a chagrined look on his face and heard the catcalls from the USL dugout of words I won't repeat here. Evidently, in their estimation I had been a little too gung ho for a preseason game, especially on their home field, with them behind on the scoreboard, and their opponents measly high school kids. Both dugouts emptied for a few minutes...ours more slowly than the college boys...we were brash high school kids but we weren't stupid...at least not about that. I got a 15 minute lecture after the game from our coach (with the whole team listening in) about playing with passion, but also playing with a sense of respect and dignity for your opponent. You don't cheat, you don't kick them when they are down, and you don't purposely humiliate them and make them look bad. You whip them fair and square.

I don't know if all of the players named in the Mitchell Report ever got that kind of speech from one of his coaches along the way, and frankly there have been times in my life when I didn't follow Coach Stelly's admonition either...but somewhere, if the accusations are true, these guys lost sight of the fact that the way you play the game is as important as whether you win...instead they heard, "The end justifies the means"..."you only go around once in life so you have to grab for all the gusto you can"..."winning isn't the best thing...it's the only thing".

I'll bet Coach Stelly would be happy to volunteer to chew their butts out for trying to take a shortcut to winning and disgracing the game. So, step up Barry... you have more homeruns than any player in history, but you could still learn a thing or two from the old Coach...

Pling...Pling...

dg