Common blunder in Paul Daugherty/USA Today column

Ha! Not quite.

Luque, Gonzalez and Estalella are pretty well-known players. Bithorn's name should be very familiar now, because of the stadium. Carrasquel's not too hard, either. The others I definitely had to look up.

If you're interested in who else of (very light) color played in the era B.R (before Robinson):

<a href="http://www.baseball-reference.com/bio/Cuba_born_debut.shtml">Cubans</a> (38)
<a href="http://www.baseball-reference.com/bio/P-R-_born_debut.shtml">Puerto Ricans</a> (2)
<a href="http://www.baseball-reference.com/bio/Venezuela_born_debut.shtml">Venezuelans</a> (2)

And speaking of places of origin, don't forget <a href="http://www.baseball-reference.com/k/koukajo01.shtml">the</a> <a href="http://www.baseball-reference.com/r/roonefr01.shtml">three</a> <a href="http://www.baseball-reference.com/q/quinnja01.shtml">Austro-Hungarians</a>.

 

Glad you did. Luque, I knew, and of course, Carrasquel, but the rest were welcome news. Thanks for the effort.

 

I think most fans could care less.
If they did, they'd have been voting with their wallets for three years.

 

Still say it's two different arguments, Buck. I think baseball was wrong for ignoring blacks and ignoring steroids. There, that's parallel.

But if I'm disgusted with those players who cheat via steroids, what's the parallel regarding the color line? I don't see one that matches many fans' disdain for the cheaters themselves, within the sport as a whole.

Arguments like Daugherty's infantilize the players, suggesting that only the institution bears responsibility for doing the right or wrong things and that players will just do ... whatever. It's like blaming newspapers for plagiarists. There's lots to blame newspapers for, but the plagiarists themselves bear the greatest burden. Every guy who goes into a restroom stall with a syringe made that choice individually, putting his health and his reputation on the line whether there was teeth in a rule somewhere or not. No pre-1947 player made a choice about race individually that carried any weight and cheated other players in the majors.

Good list of early Latin players, by the way. I knew of many, but hadn't gotten around to Ben's request for names.

 

I think you're right about that. The attitude seems to be, "They were all doing steroids. Therefore, the playing field was level." I'm starting to come around to that way of thinking myself.

 

Yes. I hear Bocachica Stadium is state-of-the-art. ;D

 

If you're only disgusted with the players and not the institutionalized cover-up, then Major League Baseball is berry, berry happy with you as a fan. That makes it easy for them to find a few scapegoats, blame them as exceptions from the norm, and keep on taking your money.

It's the sausage-factory syndrome; fans are only showing disdain for the person injecting the sausage, and not that those players don't deserve it, but it ignores all of the other factors that made it so easy and rewarding to use it. Basically, everyone in baseball -- their peers, their union leaders, management and even the commissioner, not to mention fans who kept setting attendance records and media attention that glorified all the records being smashed -- put those players in a room full of sausages, shut the door, and assured them that nobody was looking.

And NOW, fans are going to get upset about those players and nothing else? Hell, we encouraged them. We were complicit, though we don't want to believe that. Which, frankly, makes it worse than the color barrier, in that limited respect. More fans fought for integration in the 1920s, '30s and '40s than they did for cleaning up baseball from PEDs in the 1980s and '90s.

Sorry, but the fans' reactions being simplistic and narrow -- anger directed only at the players, when there are a lot more factors at work here -- does not change the truth. That's why the parallel fits: because the truth is, it IS an institutionalized problem. Baseball, of course, doesn't want you to think that -- MLB would rather have you think it was a couple of rogue players with needles up their asses. That's a sucker's bet.

 

Think we're still tipping at different windmills.

I am -- and "we" are -- no more responsible for the cheaters injecting steroids than we are responsible for Cal Ripken playing all those games in a row. We might have been dupes for trusting baseball to police itself properly or for continuing to support a sport that was peddling hokum or was being held hostage by its union. Doesn't make us accomplices.

I don't accept this institutionalizing of personal responsibility. Blame the IRS for tax cheats. Blame the mortgage industry for taking on way too much debt for your income. Blame the internet for molesting a teenager. Blame Hostess for making the Twinkies that fueled my shooting spree. Blame baseball for the syringe that I stick in my hind quarters, even though 20 (10? 2?) teammates aren't doing it.

Is the fear of getting caught and punished the only reason to behave properly? If there were no law against knocking down old ladies and taking their purses, would you do it? The substances themselves were illegal and using them was cheating, whether you were tested or not, whether baseball had a collectively bargained penalty or not.

 

I didn't say "we" were responsible; I said we were all complicit. There's a difference. Yes, the players should be held responsible -- but so should the union, so should management, so should the commissioner, and so on.

There's a lot of blame to go around, and when your anger is solely focused on the ones who happened to be caught -- as Deep Throat would say -- "you're missing the overall."

Baseball turned a blind eye, which by the way it's had a long, long history of doing, and complicitly encouraged players to enhance their performance. They actively cultivated an environment that made it easy -- and a no-brainer -- for players to use illegal drugs, regardless of if it was wrong. That's the truth.

I'm not saying the players shouldn't be blamed, but there's also more than one truth to this whole deal.

 

Guess that was my quibble with the Daugherty column and those like it: The sweeping indictment of all things baseball as a way of throwing up our hands and just going along with "Steroids Era" as a band-aid solution to the cheaters and record plunderers.

Maris and Aaron deserve better, no matter what Tom House says they were imbibing.