Thanks to the COM352 students for contributing a bunch of new pages! I'll be moving these pages into the main area of the wiki soon.

From UMassWiki

Since the dawn of time, or at least since professional baseball was introduced to the United States in 1876, the sport has been shaped and twisted by various levels of greed. My cultural text is that there seem to be two main desires for the people involved in professional baseball throughout history. One of these desires is present from boyhood: winning, fame, being idolized by millions of children who want to grow up to be just like you – in short, legend status. The other is a desire that historically does not present itself until adolescence or later (key word here is “historically”, though the research regarding this desire in young children nowadays would require a completely separate paper). This one can be summed up pretty easily with one word: money. The function of both of these is to live a more comfortable and desirable life.

Wealth appears to be the dominant aspiration in the early years of professional baseball. In 1877 the Louisville Grays were caught accepting bribes to throw games. In 1914 the Boston Braves took a four-game World Series sweep over the Philadelphia Athletics, who were playing their worst as a way of lashing out against their stingy owner (Carney). In 1919 was the notorious Black Sox Scandal, where eight players from the Chicago White Sox were found to have been involved in hefty bribes in exchange for throwing the World Series against the Cincinnati Reds (Durslag). The aftermath of this particular scandal was so powerful (all eight of the players involved were banned from baseball for life) that it seemed to put a hold on this type of incident for a number of years. In 1980, Reds manager Pete Rose was given a lifetime ban from baseball after he was caught gambling on his own players (Dougherty).

Issues of money have continued to play a major role in the shaping of professional baseball, though nowadays it mostly seems to be legal. From Alex Rodriguez’s new ten-year $275 million deal, to the Seibu Lions accepting $51.1 million in 2006 just to allow Red Sox general manager Theo Epstein just to talk to Daisuke Matsuzaka, to Doug Mientkiewicz holding onto the 2004 World Series winning baseball, hoping to be bought out by the Baseball Hall of Fame so he could make a few extra dollars.

In more recent history, many players have been caught using performance-enhancing drugs in order to boost their performance. Many of the players baseball fans have looked up to in the past decade or so have had their reputations tainted with steroid allegations – Sammy Sosa, Mark McGwire, Jason Giambi, and most recently, Barry Bonds (Kindred). Why do players continue to use these drugs? All of the players previously mentioned were already well on their way to being remembered as some of the greatest players in baseball history, so why did they feel the need to risk being banned from baseball? “I like to be against the odds. I’m not afraid to be lonely at the top. With me, it’s just the satisfaction of the game. Just performance” (Baseball Hound). This quotation from Barry Bonds brings back the question stated earlier: what happened to just playing because you love it? What happened to playing because you’ve broken into a career you have dreamed about since you were in Little League?

This greed has undoubtedly changed Major League Baseball. The repercussions of some of these events will always be remembered. Even in 2005 when the White Sox crawled their way back to the World Series, New York Times reporter Dave Anderson said of the team, “the franchise is again haunted, and always will be, by what happened in 1919” (Baseball Hound).

Baseball is part of the American Culture, part if its history. I hope it will always be a part of that culture, but will greed put this long-beloved tradition to an end? Although baseball officials are doing all they can to prevent bribery and steroids and any other form of cheating from making too much of an impact on the game, it is inevitable that players will want more and more each year. Just like everything else in our culture, baseball is ever-changing. Whether that change is for better or for worse is up to the players. I believe they can, even if only one at a time, save the good reputation of America’s Favorite Pastime.

Works Cited Carney, G. (2007). 1919: Eight myths out. Nine: A Journal of Baseball History and Culture, 15(2), 121. Dougherty, C. (2005, April 15). The source for scandal. The Wall Street Journal, pp. W1. Durslag, M. (2005, November 4). The Black Sox: My side of the story. Sports Illustrated, 103 71. Kindred, D. (2003, November 24). A shot in the arm baseball didn't need. Sporting News, 227(47) 68. Baseball Quotes. Retrieved December 10, 2007, from Baseball Hound: http://www.freewebs.com/baseballhound/quotes.htm