Just a Little Class

Class. Whether it is Boston, Oakland(Chokeland), NY, Tampa Bay, Pitsburgh, Anaheim/LA, or Milwalkee it is hard to make an argument that class exists. While I will not dissagree that fights are part of the game, that throwing at a guy is part of the game, however, I wonder if lately it is not the case that game is part of the fight. Has baseball really gone away from being America's Pasttime to become America's Scandalous Entertainment?

As much as I enjoyed seeing A-rod getting the crap kicked out of him last year it was not as nearly good as the Home Run in the ninth Bill Mueller had to win the game. Yet no one remembers Mueller's heroic antics because their minds are firmly stuck on Tek's glove meeting A-rod's face.

On Sunday, my heart went out to Ortiz - no one should throw at someones head in a game like that, if ever. Throwing up and in is fine, but not at the head. Yet, what's the point of a brawl in April with the Devil Rays? OK - so stick up for Ortiz -- but why did the benches have to clear a second time that game? Why did we retaliate after we had obviously won the fight before? This year we don't even have the justification of 86 years of misery - we won - BE HAPPY - and don't fight with the Devil Rays.

In a time where baseball is blackened by Steroids, Gambling, and who knows what else, why add to the black mark with pointless fights? Why take away from a game that should be so pure and so holy and perfect? How can you not read the following quotes and not get chills up your spine?

Any baseball is beautiful. No other small package comes as close to the ideal in design and utility. It is a perfect object for a man's hand. Pick it up and it instantly suggests its purpose: it is meant to be thrown a considerable distance-thrown hard and with precision. Its feel and heft are the beginning of the sport's critical dimensions; if it were a fraction of an inch larger or smaller, a few centigrams heavier or lighter, the game of baseball would be utterly different.

Hold a baseball in your hand ... Feel the ball, turn it over in your hand; hold it across the seam or the other way, with the seam just to the side of your middle finger. Speculation stirs. You want to get outdoors and throw this spare and sensual object to somebody or, at the very least, watch somebody else throw it. The game has begun. --Roger Angell in Five Seasons "

I can sit in a ballpark after a game and love looking at the field. Everybody's gone, and the ballpark is empty, and I'll sit there. I sit there and think, 'Is this as close to heaven as I'm going to get?' Or, 'If I get to heaven, will there be baseball?"--Kim Braatz-Voisard, Silver Bullets' center fielder, 1997

"The players are too serious. They don't have any fun any more. They come to camp with a financial adviser and they read the stock market page before the sports pages. They concern themselves with statistics rather than simply playing the game and enjoying it for what it is." - Rocky Bridges, from The Sporting News, December 12, 1970

I love baseball. I always will. Yet it seems the things you love break your heart. Baseball is doing that.