Sonia Sotomayor saved baseball. So we were reminded last week after she was nominated to the Supreme Court.
Before the 1995 baseball season began—the year after the players' strike—Judge Sotomayor issued a temporary injunction to get the season started, giving owners and players breathing room to reach an accord. She saved the game, in other words, just in time for the players to trash it all over again.
In the wake of scandals involving Manny Ramirez, Alex Rodriguez, the 2007 Mitchell Report and all the misbehavior and criminal activity preceding it (generally, stuff that happened after 1995), baseball may need to be saved again. This time it will take more than a judicial decision.
A new book called American Icon (Knopf) by four New York Daily News reporters suggests that it was far worse than we were led to believe. Though the writing lapses into cliches ("fall from grace", "Texas grit"), the facts are all here and the verdict is clear: Roger "The Rocket" Clemens is a cheater.
He may also be a criminal, having lied under oath to Congress. So, too, did Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa, Raphael Palmeiro, Miguel Tejeda and all the other sleazebags caught in the steroids web.
Despite having tainted a game some of us love, the scandals did have their funny side. American Icon, for example, opens at a party in Miami worthy of a scene in Scarface. While hubbies Jose Canseco and Roger Clemens sneak off to meet their drug connection in another room, their wives entertain themselves by comparing their boob jobs.
Clemens, you learn later, also grew a pair of boobs to rival his wife's—one of the side effects of the steroids and human growth hormone (HGH) he used for the last 10 years of his career. If you're doing the math, that would be from the time he left the Red Sox as "washed up" and then saw his career reborn in Toronto, New York and Houston.
The jock-sniffing press was party to this deception. Reporters duly credited the ridiculous surge in the Rocket's numbers to a tough workout regimen devised by Brian McNamee, his personal trainer—the spin Clemens gave them. There was just one catch: McNamee was also his drug supplier and often the guy who wielded the syringe.
Though other spoiled, overpaid stars had similar lifestyles, Icon focuses on Clemens, who seems to have behaved like a gangsta rapper: the drugs, the private jet, the jet-black Hummer, chicks on the side, luxury condos for his assignations. All that was lacking to complete the scenario was a drive-by shooting.
How sleazy was this Rocket? How about partying with Monica Lewinsky at the Manhattan hotel where he was shacked up with his drug-addicted mistress, the nearly underaged Mindy McCready?
The book's title is just plain wrong. Clemens was a much-feared pitcher, but iconic status comes to those who are revered. He was always known as more of a thug. He will always be known for throwing the splintered head of a bat at Mike Piazza in a World Series game (an act later blamed on "'roid rage") only months after he nearly ended the all-star catcher's career, if not life, with a savage beaning for which he never apologized.
And what is so "American" about Clemens that is not true of Bonds, Jason Giambi, McGwire, A-Rod and others? That he's from Texas? That he's a dickhead?
No, the most American thing about this story is the total lack of leadership at the top. Commissioner Bud Selig, a former team owner, has spent his disgraced tenure cutting media deals, raking in the cash and looking the other way when trouble beckons. As a result, he only acted when the Bonds scandal broke—his Hurricane Katrina. Though the steroid abuse was baseball's open secret for a decade, Selig waited until 2007, when he brought in George Mitchell to investigate.
Perhaps it is time that the National Pastime, like the White House, had some adult supervision again.
