Twenty years ago, Jim Bouton kept the diary that became the baseball book Ball Four. The anniversary has gone unremarked–perhaps because magazines and television news shows are waiting for the anniversary of the book’s publication, next year, perhaps because with all the ballyhoo surrounding Woodstock and the moon walk and the Cubs’ choke and the Miracle Mets there hasn’t been enough time, enough resources. Of course, more likely than either of these two answers is that no one thought the occasion important enough, which is indicative of the state we are in. The Pete Rose scandal has once again left people who should know better pondering big questions like “Why do we create heroes?” and “Why do they always let us down?” Ball Four, when it came out in 1970 complete with high-profile excerpts running in sports sections around the country, was supposed to have changed all that. The idea that Mickey Mantle might have actually hit a homer in the mists of a hangover, or that he might have led late-night peep sessions on the rooftops of hotels known by the euphemism “shooting beaver,” or that players with the expansion Seattle Pilots might have actually kissed each other in some sort of homophobic joke–i.e., that baseball players, like the rest of us, were human–was revolutionary at the time, and there were those of us who thought the game was better for the drastic change. (Bouton, I would argue, is one of the most important baseball figures of the postwar era. A thread runs through his life–from his career as a baseball player and author to his later business enterprises developing Big-League Chew and baseball cards for the average person–in which he attempts to make the game, its players, and its trappings more accessible to the fans.) Yet an argument that at this point in the grand scheme Bouton is a more important figure than Pete Rose would be painfully optimistic. Because the revolution didn’t stick and never will. Because the forces of counterrevolution are too strong in this game. Baseball always revitalizes itself–that’s one of the remarkable things about it–but unfortunately part of the process of revitalization is the resurgence of hero worship. Looking back at the various baseball traumas involving the Black Sox, Babe Ruth, the finding–with the arrival of Jackie Robinson–that many baseball people had been racist and that many more still were, and on to Ball Four, it seems that every generation has its period when it is disappointed by some star, or when it sees behind the curtain and then imagines itself more sophisticated, cured like a piece of meat. Yet each new generation falls prey to the same old trap–the lure of the hero.
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As for the ban on Rose, it is fair, reasonable, and completely called for. Much has been made of how society has changed in the years since the Black Sox scandal, how gambling is now recognized as an illness (when it’s not merely a pleasant diversion), how it’s wrong to punish a gambler more severely than a cocaine addict. This is where the hero-worshipers suddenly change tack and say, “Ball players are human too.” It’s true, ball players are prone to the same illnesses as everyone else, but gambling is the one illness forbidden them. It’s unfairly harsh to say this particular “illness” is “not allowed,” but that is one of the many unreasonable conditions professional athletes accept in being athletes.
If there is any ill worse than ill, that is the lot of Pete Rose. A land that creates heroes invites tragedy, and if there’s small solace in that perhaps we can dream of a land where Jim Bouton is revered above Pete Rose.
