At Stake Is the Integrity of Baseball

To: The Commissioner of Baseball, 350 Park Ave., New York, N.Y.

Dear Commissioner:

It must be as obvious to you as it is to the rest of us that we, as a nation, are in a posture of headlong morality these days and have been since Watergate.

None of the old-fashioned verities, the good old American gamesmanship, let the buyer beware, and protect yourself at all times in the clinches, prevail anymore.

People do unspeakable things on stage, people say unconscionable things in films, but that’s art.

Baseball is not art, Commissioner. Baseball, like the White House, the chancery, automobile manufacturers and oil companies, has to be above reproach these days. It’s the way America is going. You can’t sell snake oil anymore and you can’t turn speedometers back. In my business, you can’t even accept Christmas gifts.

Baseball, it seems to me, is slow to catch on to the new morality, Commissioner. Baseball seems to think it’s still 1910 and the old laissez-faire attitudes still prevail. Baseball is getting a bad rep. Baseball is coming into focus as an enterprise that’s still too free.

You know what I’m referring to. That pitcher flipping an emery board out of his pocket and being found in possession of a piece of sandpaper, batters being accused of corking their bats.

Now, this was considered just a part of the grand old game in the past. You got away with what you could. Ty Cobb sharpened his spikes right in the dugout, for crying out loud. A guy got killed with a pitched ball.

The spitball got outlawed right after that but it was allowed till well into the ‘30’s. Any pitcher who came into the game with it was allowed to finish his career with it.

Of course, it didn’t disappear. With the spitball outlawed, pitchers had to find another way to gain an advantage over the batter. They came up with Vaseline, hair tonic, thumbtacks, sandpaper, emery boards, belt buckles and nail files.

It’s ironic, Commissioner, that, in the old days, pitchers didn’t need any artificial aids to scuff up baseballs. They were already scuffed.

That’s because, in the Depression days, owners didn’t throw baseballs out of the game just because they came up with a speck of dust on them or the hitters didn’t like the way they sounded. That cost too much. A ball stayed in the game till it got out of round or the stuffing began to leak out of it.

I remember the old-time catcher, Ernie Lombardi, telling me once that, in the era of hard times when he caught, by the sixth inning the ball was so scuffed and dirty, you couldn’t help throwing a curveball with it.

Today, you’ll see a third baseman--or the pitcher himself--kneading the ball to loosen the cover, separate the seams and make a breaking ball easier to throw. A brand-new, glistening-white, smooth ball just slips out of the hand with no rotation on it.

So, pitchers feel persecuted. They feel the ball is souped-up, so are the surfaces that turn ground balls into base hits, and the elements are against them.

The distinguished Washington columnist, George Will, took note of the dichotomous position of baseball when he pointed out that when you cheat at cards or dice, you are a crook. When you cheat at baseball, you are a “competitor.” You are stopping that guy from keeping food off your family’s table.

We used to admire guys who broke the rules to win. Maybe we still do. Maybe that’s why Ollie North became a folk hero. Jesse James, too.

But, what about the new morality? Does baseball have to join it? Baseball and football have historically winked at rules infractions. An outfielder traps a ball on a short hop and pretends he caught it. A lineman holds his man so much that the game had to get skin-tight jerseys to aid in enforcement. The hidden-ball trick is legal. But is it moral?

Even in courtrooms, the surprise witness, that staple of late night television, is no longer with us. You have to furnish the defense with a list of your witnesses and what they will testify to.

Covert is out. We even have to tell our enemies what we’re up to now. Remember when Knute Rockne suited up a guy in a wrong jersey in practice to confuse USC? That’s a no-no now.

Baseball is already struggling with its image as a hotbed of drug abuse and now it comes into focus as a congress of cheats and liars.

There is no doubt a batter will use a corked bat if he can get away with it. If nothing else, it will give the batter a psychological lift, like a placebo, whether it works or not.

Will the modern public view this with chuckling tolerance, a boys-will-be-boys attitude? I don’t know.

Corking the bat smacks of marking the cards, boiling the dice. Like to see the home run record broken by some guy wielding a cork-filled bat, would you?

The integrity of the game is at stake. Next, somebody will be wondering if Roy Hobbs used a corked bat.

Hollywood has never been able to deal with baseball except as an entity manipulated by an outside agency, usually supernatural--angels in the outfield, a mystery substance concocted by a university professor, a player under contract to the devil.

Baseball itself is always terrified it will turn out to be manipulated by some outside agency, too. Someone like Arnold Rothstein.

In other games, they cheat. Track athletes use steroids. Baseball’s cheating has always seemed more whimsical than criminal. But times, they are a-changing. I can remember when I thought that “inside information” was what Wall Street was for.

I guess if you can’t have illegal substances in your body you can’t have them on the equipment either.

So, it’s the kind of a world where there’s no part for W. C. Fields anymore.

What do you do? Put the bats, like the baseballs, in charge of the umpires so there will be no tampering? Suspend a guy for a year? For life? Not in an era when multiple murderers get community service sentences.

You could do what they do in golf. Put everybody on the honor system. Ballplayers are a company of honorable men, too. Aren’t they?