Are you tired of it, all the literary rhapsodizing about how baseball is some gentle art form, a game for poets? Well, Roger Angell and George Will, it's time for a reality check.
The Big Baseball Myth casts baseball and its heroes in a golden haze. But the myth doesn't jibe with the headlines - and it never has.
As the season opens and the soliloquies begin anew - over the symmetry of the ball field and the lazy, quirky way in which the game unfolds, all of this
somehow resonant of the laws of the universe and how life gently unfolds outside the stadium gates - it's time to get some perspective. Not everything that happens between the foul lines is pretty.
We tell ourselves that the rich, whining players of today are some modern aberration. Not true. Check out the sports pages of a century ago, and you'll find endless media attacks on egocentric head cases:
There's the great Ty Cobb, "The Georgia Peach," who kicked a black chambermaid down a flight of hotel steps.
Or Phillies outfielder Sherry Magee, who broke an umpire's jaw in 1911 after a called third strike (and later became an umpire himself).
Or John Clarkson, a pitcher for the Chicago White Stockings who won 53 games in 1885 and later killed his wife with a razor - yet still got elected to the Hall of Fame. And Pete Rose can't get in because he gambled?
Today, Dodgers outfielder Darryl Strawberry is in rehab again. But substance abuse has been a perennial problem in the game: The Philadelphia Athletics hired private detectives to shadow the team's chronic drunks in 1882.
"Wake up the echoes at the Hall of Fame," wrote that great baseball realist, Bill Veeck, "and you will find that baseball's immortals were a rowdy and raucous group of men who would climb down off their plaques and go rampaging through Cooperstown, taking spoils, like the Third Army busting through Germany."
Let's step back and enjoy a few golden moments from baseball's Memory Lane.
MAY 15, 1894. Baltimore Orioles third baseman John McGraw, another Hall of Famer, waits for a hell-bent baserunner named Tommy Tucker of the Boston Beaneaters. Tucker slides hard, and McGraw kicks him in the head as he lays on the bag. Tucker jumps to his feet, and the two start punching it out. The crowd rises to egg the pair on. Midway through the fight, someone notices that the right-field stands are on fire. Whoopee!
