For all the fanfare surrounding Alex Rodriguez at U.S. Cellular Field in Chicago on Monday night, you wonder if anybody checked out the prospect of stirrings at the Oak Woods Cemetery.
There, approximately 5.8 miles — or about the total distance of two average seasons of juiced A-Rod home runs — from where the New York Yankees and Chicago White Sox played, is the resting place of the late Kenesaw Mountain Landis, baseball’s first commissioner (1920-44) and a savior of the game.
Though the spirit of the one-time judge is undoubtedly restive these days.
The man who laid down the law on gambling in baseball in the wake of the 1919 Black Sox Scandal couldn’t have been too happy with the notion of a shamed A-Rod still in uniform in those parts. Nor should we.
While it is encouraging that baseball sanctioned 13 players in the wake of the Biogenesis scandal Monday, the biggest mass drug bust in U.S. sports didn’t go far enough where the Yankees’ third baseman, its biggest offender, is concerned.
He has a 211-game suspension hanging over his head pending appeal — and $61 million of his current contract to come back to in 2015, even if the penalties are upheld.
The other members of the dirty baker’s dozen, including All-Stars Nelson Cruz of the Texas Rangers, Everth Cabrera of the San Diego Padres and Jhonny Peralta of the Detroit Tigers, got 50-game sentences.
A-FRAUD, as he is now increasingly known, has 647 home runs, fifth most in baseball history, and three American League MVP Awards — officially named the Kenesaw Mountain Landis Memorial Award, by the way.
But if baseball really has anything near the mountain of goods on A-Rod it suggests it does — and it cited “use and possession of numerous forms of prohibited performance-enhancing substances” over several years — it should have thrown not just a book but baseball’s whole library at him.
With all that and his repeated obfuscation and allegations of a cover-up, A-Rod shouldn’t be anywhere near a Major League Baseball park. Especially on Chicago’s south side, where Landis banned eight members of the 1919 White Sox from baseball for good in 1921. A-Rod should have found a place among them in the gone-for-life Hall of Shame.
That’s something in the commissioner’s power under Article XI of the collective bargaining agreement, which gives the commissioner latitude to take steps for the “preservation of the integrity … of the game.” Baseball threatened to impose it in trying to leverage a deal with A-Rod, but, unfortunately, didn’t follow through.
SOMEHOW it is hard to imagine Landis trying to barter on suspensions the way the current commissioner, Bud “Let’s Make A Deal” Selig, has.
“Baseball,” Landis insisted in his time, “is something more than a game to an American boy; it is his training field for life work. Destroy his faith in its squareness and honesty and you have destroyed something more; you have planted suspicion of all things in his ear.”
Rodriguez and his ilk have reinforced the latter in all of us.
Which is why booting him from the game for good makes for the best deterrent.
