In times of crisis, baseball has always had the good sense to rely on the simplest of solutions, the most basic antidote of all:
Baseball.
Baseball itself.
We know the legend of Babe Ruth was hatched in the shadow of the fixed World Series of 1919, that at a time when public confidence was swooning and public cynicism was cresting, Ruth stepped into the vortex, swung his 48-ounce bat, swatted home runs at a magnificent pace and rescued the sport from oblivion.
We know that at a time when the country was coming to terms with its eclectic racial makeup, a time before Brown v. Board of Education and Little Rock and Selma, it was baseball that made itself whole, that welcomed men of all colors and creeds, that put an end to its shameful segregated history and served as a beacon for the rest of the nation …. all because one man, Jackie Robinson, played a beautiful game beautifully well.
And we know that in the wake of the ugliness of the strike of 1994 and 1995, baseball turned to a graying ambassador of grace and dignity, Cal Ripken, to try and open once more a national conversation with its wounded fans. On the night in September of ’95 when he surpassed Lou Gehrig’s supposedly unsurpassable record, doing it before a President and in front of Gehrig’s old teammate, Joe DiMaggio, you really did get the sense that, despite it all, baseball was going to be OK.
This is where baseball finds itself again, this morning, on the doorstep of the Biogenesis end game, when names and penalties will be handed down and when the noise around Alex Rodriguez will be clarified, once and for all, into what at best will be a long and damaging suspension and what at worst will be the kind of ruinous court fight that will leave anyone in sight of the bailiff with bloody noses and broken reputations.
Now, again, it is on baseball to solve its problems the best way it knows how: with baseball. The game can heal the game, the sport can help the sport recover from this latest blackened eye. And rise again even stronger. It always has. It always does.
You got a taste of that if you stayed up late Wednesday night and early yesterday morning and took in the magnificent pitchers’ duel between Hiroki Kuroda and Clayton Kershaw, the two of them matching zeroes up and down Dodger Stadium, the Yankees finally winning and Mariano Rivera gathering a 1-2-3 save in the ninth for the cherry on top.
But it isn’t only in New York and Los Angeles where this is possible. The great baseball cities of the flyover states are experiencing the kinds of baseball summers that stay with you for years, traditional baseball beachheads like St. Louis and Cincinnati, and wonderful baseball towns like Kansas City and Pittsburgh that have lain dormant for years. Boston has fallen back in love with its Red Sox, Baltimore with its Orioles.
That’s how baseball survived, and survives. Because the game, somehow, has always been stronger than the scoundrels who periodically try to sabotage it, to bring it down.
The dark irony, of course, is it wasn’t Ripken alone who tried to rehab the game the last time, but all those home runs that started flying out of ballparks aided, we know now, by a raft of pharmaceutical assistance. Baseball insists it has learned its lessons, seems now to be embracing the sunny side of the street. It should. It has the greatest weapon of recovery it could possibly possess: Baseball itself.
It better be enough. It needs to be enough.