COMMENTARY : Snider Becomes the Duke of Greed

Duke Snider returned to Brooklyn the other day, and somehow it was as if they had to extradite him out of the 1950s. Forty years from 1955, when Snider and the Dodgers finally won the World Series from the Yankees, the wonderful ballplayer known as the Duke of Flatbush was listed in criminal information documents filed in the U.S. District Court of the Eastern District as “the defendant Edwin D. Snider.”

The charge against him was conspiracy to defraud the government. This is about baseball card shows and false income tax returns, the way it was with Pete Rose and Darryl Strawberry. The government wants us to know it prosecutes memory now in baseball along with everything else.

Snider was in the courtroom of Judge Edward Korman along with Willie McCovey, the old San Francisco Giant who also pleaded guilty to a single count of tax evasion. McCovey is not the Willie of Terry Cashman’s lovely song “Willie, Mickey and the Duke,” which is about Mays and Mantle and Snider, the great New York center fielders of the ‘50s. But now this Willie is in trouble with the law, and so is Duke Snider.

And Mickey Mantle almost died before a liver transplant saved him. In a year when we have spent so much time talking about the troubles of younger New York baseball stars like Doc Gooden and Darryl Strawberry, some old stars, some of the biggest there were once, aren’t doing much better. It is not just big money that feels as if it ruins everything in sports. It is easy money too.

So in a courthouse at Cadman Plaza East just over the Brooklyn Bridge from Manhattan, on the other side of Brooklyn from where Ebbets Field stood and maybe the other side of the world, Duke Snider pleaded guilty to a felony.

Snider is 68 years old. He must have felt every single day of that in court. He never signed a $20-million contract with the Brooklyn Dodgers the way Strawberry once did with the Los Angeles Dodgers. His salary for a season was what some stars make for a game now. So these card shows were a small way to catch up on all the big money he missed. Then Snider cheated the government the same as Rose did and Strawberry.

One of the promoters from whom Snider took money was “Pete Rose Hit King Marketing.” What goes around in the card show business keeps coming around. Now it brought Duke Snider, No. 4 of the Dodgers, back to Brooklyn in a way he was never supposed to come back.

He took $10,000 in cash for three days of appearances six years ago. He did not report about $10,000 a year in money just like it between 1984 and 1993. Rose made millions from baseball and Strawberry came along later and made more. Snider goes in with them anyway, for $10,000 a year, which was his salary once when he was one of the best ballplayers ever.

Snider is as guilty as Strawberry, who is 33 and black. His crime is no less serious in the eyes of the law because he is 68 and white, and once played for one of the most romantic sports teams of them all, in a Brooklyn ballpark, now gone, but that is still talked about there as a shrine. It just felt different to them in Brooklyn, maybe because the ‘50s were supposed to be safe.

“There’s one difference between Strawberry and the Duke,” one man said in a Brooklyn bar. “This is the first time the Duke ever let us down.”