For one reason or another, probably through fault of my own, I am not able to access my old 360 blog as the owner of the blog.  Yahoo keeps insisting I set up an account. Maybe Yahoonians sit at computers all day searching for blog entries that say people are moving on to greener pastures and disable their blogging abilities.  This makes me questions the 19,000 blogs on 360 that haven't been updated since the turn of the century (it's still cool to say that), but whatever, Yahoo can do as they wish.

And... since I've learned about and decided to participate in this here new-fangled thing called a blog carnival, I'm going to post, through the magic of cutting and pasting, an older entry (although still timely I believe) here at my new home. 

So, without further adieu...

In Honor of Judge Landis (Commodo servo nos, A. Bart Giamatti)

First let me warn the non-baseball fans reading this, you may not have an interest in continuing. Then again, it still may be an interesting read, so feel free to move on. There will be references that may mean nothing to you, but there will also be things that are universally understood.

I composed, in my head, a good portion of this entry on my way to Kiel last Friday night, accompanied by U2 and Starbucks. Then, over the weekend and the last three days, I forgot portions, added portions, and found myself not quite knowing where to go with my thoughts. I knew there was a part of me that had latched onto the scandal, and I checked message boards and tried to spark conversations with several people around me, but a lot of what I needed to say and hear, they were able to dismiss with a shrug. It's like when a relationship goes wrong and you obsess about it and your friends sort of listen, but they got it long before you did, because they knew it wouldn't work and you're still looking for answers.

Shortly after the crippling strike during the 1994 season, that bled into the 1995 season, I started working for the team. People were angry at baseball and I can remember during my very first game, standing on the field during the national anthem wondering if the stands that were relatively empty would remain so. They didn't. And the fact that I was standing on the field during the national anthem, the first of many standing on the field instances, I really didn't care how empty they remained or how full they became. I was there, and every night if 45,000 people chose not to join me, that was their problem. I understood why they were angry, but I wasn't. I had no problem seeing the team owners in a negative light and allowing it to have little effect on what I felt about the game. And the men in front of me every night were a part of a union (a concept I had not yet concluded could be out-dated farce) and they were doing what parts of unions do.

By the end of the season, all was forgiven. The individual player that I cared most about had become the new face of the game and that's what people grasped onto. The resiliency of a baseball fan is tested nearly every season and if you haven't forgiven your team by April and begun anew, I question your fan-hood. I'm also pretty sure you won't make it in this game.

The thing is, I keep getting lost in all of this. I keep flashing back to different points in time when baseball really mattered to me. And since last week, I've felt this needling weight to purge myself of what's swirling in my brain. I thought tracing a path through my baseball career would make this matter less or make me realize that something that endures through more than half of my life and through more than a century couldn't be defeated by anything. I've known since long before last week that the game is flawed. I was introduced to the imperfections of a perfect game and one of my favorite baseball quotes is part of what defines the game. The game is perfect; it's the men that make it imperfect. I've never had a problem accepting the bad apples, particularly when most of them hailed from the Big Apple. And in many instances, these people played a vital role in enriching the game. Jerks made it better because jerks made justice possible in the game.

I don't want this to be trite. I'm not even sure I'm aiming for romantic or melancholy or nostalgic. I have no idea who this is directed at because it's all wrapped up in my hometown and my childhood and adolescence and love and sex and music and yesterday and tomorrow and ancestry and motivation and art and fate and friendship. I'm not even sure at a different time of year, a less homesick time, it would have me in its grasp in quite the same way. And I can't say just yet that this might not be the thing to bring me completely back around (again) to who I was. I haven't hung on to every word of a baseball story this tight in over ten years. I think I'm waiting for a revolution that ends with my having no choice but to return to Baltimore because who else am I going to work for if that happens and they do this and he does that and suddenly everyone is pretty much happy? Well, oops.  I keep hoping someone will be just un-jaded enough to get it. It's been years since I've had one of those moments where I discover a baseball person and realize they get it, they get me. I understand much better now how people cope with baseball hurting them and why they become football fans. And I'm no longer naive enough to think they can fill the void that a broken baseball heart left them with, with a sport. (And to those of you blowing your tops right now, calm the hell down. If you are flipping out, it's because you are probably a football person. If you are flipping out because I wrote those earlier sentences, you are not a baseball person. You cannot be both. My twelve year old assertation grows increasingly more correct with every passing year: if you are a baseball person, you can never be anything but a baseball person.)

Because my computer doesn't work properly (or, maybe it does and I'm an idiot) I don't have access to word and I have to write this first in an email (because I don't trust Yahoo) and save it by sending it to myself and then cutting and pasting it into another email to continue it. If you are a computer person, please stop laughing at me. But every time I email it, my inbox jumps up to 62 emails. Now it's sixty-one. In a few paragraphs it will be sixty-two again. Then sixty-one. It's funny how numbers and meaning and implication and non-coincidence permeate my life. It's funny how I've let so much of it go and yet it still has the ability to cut me to the core.

Ok. I'm starting to get all abstract and bullshit and it sounds like something that belongs in a diary and I need to reroute. Here's my bottom line: Since the beginning I've known there were bad guys. I've known the pain of loss and the cruelty and unfairness of cheating. I have seen first hand that my team is being run by a beast that over the course of fifteen years has lost all touch with his personal roots and has grown to care very little about his hometown and heritage. But I was completely unaware that a cheating culture was being bred within the walls of where I learned to love this game. (Cut me some slack here because I know, technically, I fell in love with the game on 33rd Street, but much like being born in a city but growing up in another city, this was what I knew as home.) I never even took the time to assume that these guys were bothering to cheat because they were so God-awful bad. We were the laughing stock of pretty much everything, but it was because of the poor baseball decisions and ridiculous management. It was still familiar because we'd been bad before. It's not as if as fans, we'd never experienced humiliation before. But it was still orange and charming and us. It was identifiable and familiar and all teams with history understand that there are ups and downs.

Some people will argue that cheating and dirty play have always been a part of the game. Spit and Vaseline and sliding into home, spikes pointing into flesh, has been around since spit and Vaseline and spikes. You break down one single game, into a hundred or so pitches, a handful of which may have been thrown with foreign substance. Or maybe there is one play at the plate that ends bloody and possibly with fine. They are finite instances of bad sportsmanship. Most only bothered me when they were against my team, and rarely, rarely were they at the hands of my team. The thing that Baltimore embraced about the Ravens were they were bad-asses. Everyone hated them and many of them probably deserved hate and they were cocky and obnoxious and we reveled in that because we'd never had it before. We were angry football fans by that point and we needed cocky and obnoxious. But our baseball team, winner or losers, were good guys. The poor decisions that were made by an owner that no longer seemed to (or never did) understand the history of the team, never infiltrated the cohesive all-around good guy image we had. There was a way of doing things and even as I watched it rot slowly away, it never occurred to me that it was completely eroded.

Knowing that it is a sport-wide problem, knowing that no team has gone untouched, doesn't help to ease the heartbreak. Seeing my team's name second to top on that report (the closest we'll get to the Yankees for years to come) shames me. The Yankees are a revolving-door, money-machine of fat-cat, fat-headed barbarians that are good because how can you not be good when you throw millions and millions at the best in the game. And it so happens that many of the best in the game, right now, cheat. This doesn't tarnish the Yankees. Maybe to a Yankee fan it does; maybe to Gehrig and Ruth and Mantle, this hurts. But the Yankees I know, they are the face of a soiled game. Before, I could point to them and say "They're what's wrong with baseball." Now, when I point, I realize my team, they're no better. We could afford to compete, he chooses not to. We could hold people accountable for their character and instill history and values into them and teach them there is a way of doing things in this city that you won't find elsewhere. They chose not to.

I've spent the last ten years of my life basically being a terrible lover to the game. I've used it when I needed it, I've not bothered to be thankful for what I've been given, I've shut it out and ignored it and come to it in passive-aggressive fits of nostalgia and blame. Regardless of how many human qualities I may have given it, I knew deep down inside that it wouldn't go anywhere. I struggled to find places it fit into me now and returned to it in moments when I had no other choice, knowing it was who I was. Trusting the game and trusting them was never about winning or losing or the ups and downs. My understanding and longevity had made me a veteran. When the Brewers had their pennant chase this season, I felt sage and wise and blessed that I knew how it all can end unexpectedly, but is so worth the ride. I spent my summer under the mis-begotten impression that now, after nearly twenty years, I could take whatever the game threw at me. And I saw a glimmer of hope up I-95 that so many others saw the same future that I had seen since it occurred to me that Cal couldn't play until he was 97 and would one day have no choice but to own the team because what else would Cal do?

Faith was always the word I'd associated with baseball. The game taught me a lot about how religion is supposed to feel and I saw God more in the game than most other places in my life. And those other places wove their way into the game anyway, so it was all blurred and me and my soul. It hadn't even occurred to me, at least until last week, that it was actually trust that kept me there all of those years.