14 December 2007

Fog


The cotton wool hanging from the balcony is not a product of the vestiges of the Big Pink Holiday Party. Those would be purely mental, like what has happened to the interface between my protein-based processing unit and finger. It is a real enough meteorological phenomenon outside, a by-product of the warm moist air coming from the south and the nasty cold that originated at the Iowa Caucus sideshow.

One of the amiable dim-bulbs out there announced that what had come from the skies was only ice, and not snow, demonstrating his failure to realize that would have been a nice blanket of snow only a few years ago, and the interface between temperate winter and bitter cold is moving north.

So we have the fog, and maybe some ice on the bridges, and some very harried people out there trying to get in from the distant suburbs. Boston got hammered, and there is another storm on the way.

The solstice is still a week a way, so we have a little further to sink into the darkness before things start to get better.

That is true about baseball, too. The anniversary of what happened at Nanking seventy years ago took up most of my researching time, and there will be something along presently on the Class A criminals who were responsible, and the massacre, and great tribunal that was held before the decision to forget about it. The orgy of murder went on for nearly six weeks, so there is plenty of anniversary left.

The problem with the bad loans and all those houses that are going to go into foreclosure is worth discussion, too, even as the “affordable” housing is going up across the street. There is plenty of time to worry about that, since the smart money says that the bottom of that mess is still years in the future, and our collective futures are tied directly to the bad paper held by the banks.

Some of it might be yours and mine, too, which is the sad part. But that is going to take a while to play out, and there is no particular urgency to get to it today.

So, considering the general fog, it is completely understandable why former Senator Mitchell chose this particular moment to issue his report on drug abuse in major league baseball. His conclusions are scathing and not a bit surprising, since we have all seen what has been going on since the   “Steroids Era” started in the late 1980s.

We all noticed Mark Maguire and Barry Bulbous and the remarkable number of home runs that began, but the game liked the interest that the enhanced performance created. Senator Mitchell named names yesterday, and I won't add to the hearsay. It was not just the hitters that were doing steroids, but the pitchers and catchers and utility golden gloves. He said “everybody in baseball, Commissioners, club officials, the players' association, players shares responsibility.”

I lost interest in the game at the passion level a long time ago, around the time of the players strike. I enjoy the surge toward the Pennant at the end of the regular season, and the clash of the titans and the Cinderella team that almost takes the Series. Those are team efforts, with individual back-stories to round out the color commentary.

All the personal accomplishment records, all the awards and all the championships of the last twenty years is now tainted. Not just the home run record that Barry the Mutant set this year. All of them.

No one should be surprised, though. There were rumors about the local high school football powerhouse in Fairfax County being on the juice, the corruption having sunk that far down the food chain. It was another stop of the road to a place where nothing means anything in particular, just winning.

Senator Mitchell said that mandatory testing had done a lot to clean up the situation, at least as far as steroid use goes. The bad news is that the cheaters have moved on to Human Growth Hormones, which are undetectable in the current testing regime.

I suppose we will just have to put an asterisk behind everything that happened in baseball since the Reagan Administration, and leave it at that. I wonder if anyone would be willing to get one tattooed on a bulging bicep as a condition of entry to the Hall of Fame?

It makes you downright sentimental for the time when Pete Rose's compulsive gambling was considered a big deal. I'd put a large wager on whether they let him in the Hall, now that they know everyone is a cheater.

Copyright 2007 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

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