When I was living in San Luis Obispo, I visited the 99-cent store and happened to find Pete Rose's autobiography My Prison Without Bars, the book in which he is said to have admitted betting on baseball.
My dad is on the "Screw Pete Rose" side of the Charlie Hustle fence (usually the word "screw" is replaced with a more colorful word beginning with "F"), so that's how I grew up; my baseball heritage is anit-Pete Rose. My good friend Ryan is, as best my memory allows, to some degree (most likely the same as me--a result of his dad's preferences) on the opposite side of the Charlie Hustle fence, a more pro-Pete Rose baseball heritage. It was because of Ryan, probably, that I cracked up when I saw Pete's book, and bought it.
I read it in a few days, and my opinion of him changed. My view of Pete Rose changed to a more positive position. You won't see me with a picket, writing letters and trying to get Rose in the HOF, by any means, but you also won't see me running the "F Pete Rose" parties anymore.
The gamut of baseball and gambling runs through everything from poker with the guys in the off-season, to high-roller stakes in Manhattan poker clubs during the season, to betting on football, to the unspeakableness of betting on baseball, and plenty in between.
If you break down betting on baseball, there are shades of obviously-bad-but-not-compromising-the-integrity-of-wins-and-losses (betting on games you're not a part of to betting on your own team to win), and then there's the throwing-games-to-win-bets, which is, of course, the ultimate sin.
I don't think Pete Rose ever bet on his own team to lose, and I don't think the integrity of the losses his team had while he was making bets is in question. Is that enough to still keep him out of the HOF? Sure. What's the number one rule in baseball, even more important than not taking drugs to get better: NO BETTING ON THE GAME. A little personal accountability here, please...jeeze.
So, while I'm not now a Rose for the Hall kind of guy, I do respect how he played more, and view his achievements with more reverence than I did earlier in my life.
My mother, on a visit recently, gave me a copy of another 99-cent book she found, this one being Selena Roberts' A-Rod: The Many Lives Of Alex Rodriguez. Again, after reading it in a pair of days, I've had my opinion of the payer changed. This time for the worse.
I am an admitted Yankee fan. I am unabashedly supportive of the pinstripes, and that I have friends at all is curious, since most Yankee fans of my level are obnoxious assholes. I'm not, though, the fan that gives his own players passes on steroids while condemning the other players who used. But, in some strange magic trick, I don't condemn every single player who took 'roids. The steroid era is a blemish, a black eye on the sport as a whole, a image problem they'll have to live with going forward. Of course I view those players differently, but I don't use the word condemn, since we, as fans, were complicit in the culture that led to the rampant use of performance enhancing drugs.
I view it more as a symptom of the decay of personal accountability, humility, honest drive, and a toxic obsession with winning, the basic decay of the things that Americans take pride in, the basic decay of our American culture. Steroids in baseball isn't the end of the world, or even the end of the baseball world, it's just a symptom of this new American thing; greed and fame above all else, like the escalation of reality television and the superficiality of pop-culture. Greed and fame and the superficiality of pop-culture aren't anything new, so...
Maybe all I'm trying to say is that we're not allowed to be surprised that many, many players used steroids, human growth hormone, and lots of amphetamines.
From the Selena Roberts book we see the strange transformation of Alex Rodriguez, from sophomore year to junior year of high school. He returned after summer break having added twenty-five pounds of muscle. That doesn't happen even when you're seventeen. There's evidence that he was juicing even that early in his baseball life. There's evidence he juiced in Seattle, plenty of talk (even his own admission) that he juiced in Texas, and evidence he juiced in the Bronx.
Feeling abandoned by his father at a young age, he needed to be loved and accepted and told how great he was, and that never ended. He's portrayed in many negative lights in the book, but the ones I enjoyed reading the most were about his obsession with Derek Jeter.
Jeter: childhood household had both parents and strict structure; plays for one team; won four (five as of now) championships; disdained the gossip pages in the paper; guarded his private life vehemently; didn't care much for any baseball game he wasn't playing in; was roundly beloved by the fans in New York.
For A-Rod, the fact that he was a better athlete, had better stats, and would go down as an all-time great (before all the steroid revelations came out), the fact he wasn't more beloved in New York than Jeter was a great problem for him. He couldn't wrap his head around it. In each of those things listed for Jeter above, Alex has the complete opposite factoid.
I've been to games at Yankee Stadium and watched fans boo Alex Rodriguez. I've been at games where he's hit a home run and still been booed, "Do it in October when it counts!" a fifty-ish lady hollered from the seat directly in front of me.
I think the sympathy I had for Alex Rodriguez has evaporated since finishing the book. That's how my view of him has turned darker.
If somebody cheated and became the best of an entire group of cheaters, doesn't that still make them the best? (See Lance Armstrong)
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