R.I.P. Marvin Miller

Baseball’s FDR
His "new deal" made the MLBPA one of the strongest labor unions in the country -- and revitalized America's pastime
ALLEN BARRA
WEDNESDAY, NOV 28, 2012
http://www.salon.com/2012/11/28/r_i_p_marvin_miller_baseballs_fdr/

In 1990, I got phone call that changed my life. The man calling was Marvin Miller, whom I knew of as the labor leader who had transformed the Major League Baseball Players Association from a company union to the most successful labor organization in America. He had seen a few things I had written in the Village Voice and asked me if I’d like to work with him on his autobiography, which he later decided to call “A Whole Different Ball Game,” published in 1991.

I thought I knew baseball and business. Working with Marvin quickly disavowed me of this notion. But within a year and a half, I got an education. Meeting with him every other day for almost 18 months,  Marvin and his wife Terry – “the dynamic Terry Miller,” as sportswriter Bud Collins  called her – proved to be a revelation.

To be honest, I really didn’t know how important Marvin Miller was to baseball and all of professional sports. I didn’t find out until I began interviewing his contemporaries. There’s a quote you’ve probably been reading or hearing in the blizzard of praise since Marvin’s death was announced yesterday, the great old-time Brooklyn Dodgers and later New York Yankees announcer Red Barber saying, “Marvin Miller, along with Babe Ruth and Jackie Robinson, is one of the three most important men in baseball history.”

Actually, what Barber told me was, “I’d reckon him to be one of the three or four most important men in baseball history. Babe Ruth and Jackie Robinson, of course. I’d have to put Branch Rickey in the top four. But probably Marvin before him.” I remember Marvin smiling when I told him what Barber had said.  “I certainly wouldn’t object if he put me in back of Branch Rickey,” was his reply.

I’m not sure that Marvin’s legacy is truly understood even now.  In the nineties, he was constantly bombarded with questions like “Now that the players have won, can’t they afford to give something back to the owners?”  Marvin would smile and calmly explain that there is no such thing as “winning” unless the union continued to keep free agency open for new young players coming into the league – they were the ones who the older players had risked the work stoppages for, to preserve their free agency rights.

He would also explain that there could be no questions of “giving something back” because baseball’s management was, in fact, benefitting from baseball’s “new deal.” (He liked that phrase, because of its political connotations – the original subtitle of his book was “The Sport and Business of Baseball,” which both he and I hated. He managed to get it changed to “The Story of Baseball’s New Deal” in subsequent editions.

Two years ago in the New Yorker, Malcolm Gladwell wrote what seemed to be a laudatory feature on Marvin’s influence not only on baseball but in fact all of situations where talent negotiated with management. His conclusion:

“If one side so thoroughly dominates another in the marketplace, is it really market pricing any more? A negotiation in which a man can get paid twenty-two million dollars for hitting a baseball is not really a negotiation, it is a capitulation, and the lingering question left by Miller’s revolution is whether the scales ended up being tilted too far in the direction of Talent – whether what Talent did with its newfound power was simply create a new authority ranking, this time with itself at the top. A few years ago, a group of economist looked at more than a hundred Fortune 500 firms, trying to figure out what predicted how much money the C.E. made.  Compensation, it turned out, was only weakly related to the size and profitability of the company. What really mattered was how much money the members of the compensation committee of the board of directors made in their jobs. Pay is not determined vertically, in other words, according to the characteristics of the organization an executive works for; it is determined horizontally, according to the characteristic of the executives’ peers. They decide, among themselves, what the right amount is. This is not a market.”

This is wrong in so many ways it’s difficult to know where to being.  Let’s start here: executive pay is decided by other executives. The salaries of baseball players are decided by negotiations between the team, the player and his representative. The bottom line is that no one puts a gun to a baseball executive’s head to force him to offer a player a contract. The Texas Rangers offered Alex Rodriguez that $250+ million contract not out of generosity or because they were forced to or because Rodriguez demanded it, but because it helped them bring in a more than $250 million in new revenue from the cable network.  The Yankees paid him even more money not because someone twisted their collective arm but because they had the money and believed he was worth it — in TV ratings and ticket and merchandise sales. (I could go into an argument here that he was, after all. He won two MVP awards and helped them win their only World Series in the entire decade, but I’ll let that pass.)

The point is that in any negotiation, no one forces a baseball executive to do anything, let alone to show a modicum of common sense. A-Rod didn’t get together with a group of his peer and decides how much his salary would be.

The larger point though is that so many did not see – and still don’t – that the Major League Baseball Players Association is a union, and succeeded because it held together as a union.

Oddly enough, this prejudice against the MLBPA is more prevalent among lefties than those on the right. Conservatives, at least some of them, can grasp the concept that everyone deserve to be paid what they can earn on the open market, and that that market is determined by negotiations between labor  — or in this case, talent, if you will – and management. Liberals, particularly if they are baseball fans, have always been inclined to say things like, “Who cares if those guys win their negotiation? They’re  just a bunch of multimillionaires, like the owners.” They also say things like “Why should they be paid so much money for hitting a baseball?”  It never seems to occur to them that they’re the ones who are doing that paying and that if the money didn’t go to the players, the owners would simply pocket it.

This last point is one that needs to be made over and over because each new generation of fans needs to be educated.  The baseball players union may not seem to have much in common with steelworkers (though Marvin, who was an economist with the steelworkers union for many years, would take issue with that) or Wal-Mart employees trying to form their own union, but the inspiration is there. What Marvin told baseball players when he became executive director founded the union in 1966 can be true for any union member, “If you hold together, you can have thing you want within reason.”

Which is why it was so important for Marvin Miller to be elected to baseball’s Hall of Fame, and also why it will never happen. Today, the day after his death, I’m reading articles in just about every major paper and website in the country ripping baseball’s hierarchy (as exemplified by the mealy-mouthed hypocrite, Commissioner Bud Selig) for keeping the vote rigged so Miler would never make it to Cooperstown. They are right, but they’re missing the more important point. Let’s be honest – what else would you expect from the management class whose collective asses Miller so thoroughly whipped?  (Even if they were too arrogant and mean-spirited to understand that the union’s victories only increased their revenues and vastly expanded the popularity of the game?)

I don’t blame the baseball owners, I blame the players. The simple truth is that if they had recognized from the start that it wasn’t their talent that made them rich but their support of the union which brought them free agency in the first place, then they would have seen to it that the man who brought them this good fortune was voted into the Hall of Fame. As Bill James shrewdly observed, it’s the players’ balls and bats and gloves which make the Hall of Fame. Without those things, it’s just an empty building. If they had insisted on getting the right people on the committees and changing the voting rule, then Miller would have had a plaque in Cooperstown years ago.

Conceited jackasses like Reggie Jackson never faced up to this responsibility. Reggie was one of the first players to benefit from free agency in a big way, and even before the reserve clause was struck down, Marvin had helped Reggie to negotiate his contract with Oakland A’s war horse owner Charlie Finley.  But when the time came to throw support to Miller in 2003, Jackson declared publicly, “I think only players should be in the Hall of Fame.”  As if anyone asked Reggie to make such a judgment.

Anyway, with the permission of Marvin’s daughter Susan, I’m going to  include here the letter Marvin wrote to Jack O’Connell, secretary of the Baseball Writers’ Association of America, on May 16, 2008:

“Dear Mr. O’Connell,

Paradoxically, I’m writing to thank you and your associates for your part in nominating me for Hall of Fame consideration, and, at the same time, to ask that you not do this again.  The anti-union bias of the powers who control the Hall has consistently prevented recognition of the historic significance of the changes to baseball brought about by collective bargaining. As former Executive Director (retired since 1983) of the Players’ Union that negotiated these changes, I find myself unwilling to contemplate one more rigged Veterans Committee whose members are handpicked to reach a particular outcome while offering the pretense of a democratic vote. It is an insult to baseball fans, historians, sports writers and especially to those baseball players who sacrificed and brought the game into the 21st century. At the age of 91 I can do without farce. Sincerely, Marvin J. Miller”

To me, that settles the issue. Last week I visited Marvin at his Upper East Side apartment.  He had two things he wanted to tell me. The first – and this was the last time I would see him smile – was that Sandy Koufax had just called to thank him for everything he had done for baseball. Koufax, who retired the year Marvin was made executive director of the union, never benefitted from free agency. Marvin laughed, “Sandy’s always been a class act – but can you imagine Sandy Koufax as a free agent?”

He also proudly related a story about Alex Rodriguez. Several years ago A-Rod and his then-wife stopped to say hello to Marvin and Terry (who passed away in 2009) at an awards ceremony.  The man who didn’t play his first major league game until twelve years after Miller retired, knew enough to tell his wife, “This is the man to thank for our vacation home.”

If I ever see Alex Rodriguez again, I’m going to thank him for saying that.  If I ever meet Reggie Jackson again, I’m going to tell him what I think of him, too.

Oh, yes, one more thing Marvin told me: “If they vote me in after I’m gone, please let everyone know it is against my wishes and tell them if I was alive I would turn it down.”

Okay, Major League Baseball, you’ve been warned.

Allen Barra's next book is "Mickey and Willie -- The Parallel Lives of Baseball's Golden Age," from Crown.

Every Team in Baseball Should Use DH

Why Every Team in Baseball Should Use Designated Hitters
MLB is the only major sports league where different teams have different rules. Time for a change.
Jake Simpson
JUN 25 2012
http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2012/06/why-every-team-in-baseball-should-use-designated-hitters/258938/

Interleague play as we know it came to an end in the Major League Baseball on Sunday night when the Yankees beat the Mets, 6-5, in the rubber game of their latest Subway Series. As was the case in previous years, baseball set aside a roughly six-week block for matchups between American League and National League teams, so the only times players from each league will face other again this season are the All-Star Game and the World Series.

But next year, interleague play will be coming to you daily. The Houston Astros are set to move from the NL Central to the AL West, evening out the leagues for the first time since 1997. Unlike the setup in the early 1990s, however, there will be an odd number of teams in each league (15). That will lead to a wildly different schedule with at least one interleague series at all times. It's not inconceivable that a team could alternate between interleague and intra-league games on a weekly basis for much for the season.

With that in mind, it's time to end a baseball anachronism: pitchers hitting in one league but not the other. The new schedule means baseball just can't have it both ways anymore.

A quick historical review: Both leagues required the pitcher to hit until eccentric Oakland Athletics' owner Charlie Finley convinced the other American League owners to adopt the designated hitter rule in 1973. The National League stayed true to baseball purism and refused to adopt the DH, creating an odd dichotomy with no true parallel in the sports world. No other major sports league has such a significant rule disparity within its ranks, and all other American sports leagues have the same rules for every team.

The rule difference was fine when AL and NL teams only played each other in the World Series. It was inconvenient but acceptable when the two leagues only matched up in designated interleague blocks. But when interleague play happening all season long, the continuous switching between DH and no DH will have an adverse effect on teams from both leagues. National League teams with short benches will have to decide if they need to carry an extra hitter for their trips to American League parks (in interleague play, the rules are based on which team is at home). AL clubs would have to rethink the importance of their DH, who would regularly be relegated to a pinch-hitter role for whole series at a time.

The issue is not that the leagues would be playing each other constantly—as of now, each team is expected to play 18 to 20 interleague games in 2013. The issue is that the games would be spread out over an entire season, forcing each team to change its strategy (and its lineup) multiple times a month. It may not be earth-shattering, but even if it's just a major inconvenience, why not avoid the problem entirely? What, exactly, is the rationale for keeping the rules different in each league?

I say bring the NL into the 21st century, put the DH in both leagues and let pitchers go back to spitting sunflower seeds on the bench when their team is up at bat. The designated hitter has increased the number of players in the AL (because really, who wants to see their team carry an extra middle reliever rather than a power hitter off the bench as its 25th man?). It leads to more offense, which is what the casual baseball wants to see—remember, chicks dig the longball. And it allows aging hitters or poor fielders to keep a place in the game.

The DH gave us David Ortiz and Edgar Martinez. It extended the careers of Vladimir Guerrero, Eddie Murray, and Frank Thomas. It's allowing current AL batting leader Paul Konerko to play every day, even when he needs a break from playing first base. And it will very likely extend the careers of Alex Rodriguez and Derek Jeter by a couple years each. Other than the downfall of "playing baseball the right way," why wouldn't we want to see NL hitters have the same advantage? Now that interleague play will be a season-long constant instead of a month-long novelty, let's bring the oldest two-party system in sports a step closer to playing like one league, rather than two.

Follow the Urine!

Ryan Braun Makes a Kind of HistoryDave Zirin on February 24, 2012
http://www.thenation.com/blog/166441/follow-urine-ryan-braun-makes-kind-history

Something historic happened this week in the world of sports and, for once, I'm not talking about Jeremy Lin. Milwaukee Brewers slugger, and reigning National League Most Valuable Player Ryan Braun, appealed and beat a looming 50 game suspension for failing a steroid test. This marks the first time in history that a baseball player has successfully challenged a steroid-related penalty.

"I am very pleased and relieved by today's decision," Braun said in a statement. "It is the first step in restoring my good name and reputation. We were able to get through this because I am innocent and the truth is on our side…..We provided complete cooperation throughout, despite the highly unusual circumstances. I have been an open book, willing to share details from every aspect of my life as part of this investigation, because I have nothing to hide. I have passed over 25 drug tests in my career, including at least three in the past year.

Braun beat the suspension because of a bizarre set of circumstances surrounding his drug test that seems like the plot of an awful movie that could be called “Brotherhood of the Traveling Urine Sample." As ESPN reported, “... the collector, after getting Braun's sample, was supposed to take the sample to a FedEx Office for shipping. But the source said the collector thought the FedEx Office was closed because it was late on a Saturday and felt the sample wouldn't get shipped until Monday. As has occurred in some other instances, the collector took the sample home and kept it in a cool place, in his basement at his residence in Wisconsin.”

Yes, the reigning National League MVP and arguably the highest profile player to ever test positive for steroids, had his good name destroyed and it was all based around a piss test left in a cold, Wisconsin basement. As Barry Petchesky of Deadspin wrote, “If the procedure is so f--ked up that some dude can keep a jar of Ryan Braun's pee in his fridge over the weekend, then maybe Major League Baseball should worry less about Ryan Braun's appeal and more about a chain of custody that relies on a courier knowing the hours of his local Kinkos.”

The response to Braun's acquittal by Major League Baseball and their testers, the US Anti-Doping Agency, has been nothing short of spiteful. MLB’s official comment was, "While we have always respected that process, Major League Baseball vehemently disagrees with the decision.” Behind the scenes, they have been described as “enraged” with the arbitrator’s decision.

The USADA CEO Travis Tygert said, "It's frankly unreal. And it's a kick in the gut to clean athletes... To have this sort of technicality of all technicalities let a player off ... it's just a sad day for all the clean players and those that abide by the rules within professional baseball.”

It’s not just Major League Baseball and their professional urine brigade that's up in arms. Reporters like Mike Lupica of the New York Daily News have made clear that, aqcuittal or not, Ryan Braun has not cleared his name. “Understand something: The overturning of Braun’s 50-game suspension doesn’t mean Braun is clean, no matter what he says or how many times he says it or what he expects reasonable people to believe. He wasn’t exonerated. He was acquitted. There’s a difference."

But as Sports Illustrated’s Joe Sheehan also wrote, quite logically, “This, by the way, is how it's supposed to work. If the penalty is 50 games and millions of $, the process better be PRISTINE.”

The remarkable lack of grace being shown by Major League Baseball is stunning. It’s understandable why the USADA is upset. Their entire for-profit business model is built around finding and rooting out the players who, as Tygert said, aren’t “clean.” Imagine if police officers were only paid per-arrest and you get a picture of why the USADA already is viewed with suspicion by players and the union.

Baseball executives are sour they didn’t get to lower the hammer and are saying that Braun was only found not guilty because of a “technicality.” But as Gabe Feldman from the Tulane Sports Law Center wrote, “Chain of custody a ‘technicality’? It's critical to fair drug policy, and is mentioned 33 times in the MLB drug policy.”

Major League Baseball is more upset because they need scalps to justify to congress, sportswriters, and the minority of fans that care, that they are serious about cleaning up the game and drug testing isn’t mere window dressing. As the baseball writers dean, Peter Gammons wrote, after Braun had already been convicted in the press, “ ….what the Braun test result tells is that the Commissioner's Office and the players don't care if it's the MVP or a 4A utility infielder, they want a level playing field. Thus, in a sense, this speaks for the sincerity of the program, that it doesn't protect the faces of the sport or anyone's favorites, that Ryan Braun gets no different treatment than some kid in the Dominican Summer League."

Very noble. Yet amidst all the steroid hysteria, is a person, Ryan Braun, who actually has rights. In baseball commissioner Bud Selig’s worldview, that means he has the right to shoot himself up with painkillers, chew tobacco, and drink himself blind, but no right to use even prescribed steroids. If that’s the kind of world the union wants to collectively bargain, then that’s their choice. It’s a choice with which I disagree. This is just the cultural sanctioning of a war on drugs mentality that’s been great for the prison industry, but awful for the rest of us. I can certainly understand why players want the right to not feel like they need to take steroids to compete with the guy in the next locker. But Braun also has the right to not have his urine stored in a basement. He has the right to not have had the test results revealed before his appeal. He has the right to some dignity through this process. We don’t know at end whether Ryan Braun is “dirty.” But we know that baseball and their drug testing system has deep flaws which should be seen as intolerable not just to Ryan Braun and Major League players, but to all of us.

Dave Zirin is the author of “The John Carlos Story” (Haymarket) and just made the new documentary “Not Just a Game.” Receive his column every week by emailing dave@edgeofsports.com. Contact him at edgeofsports@gmail.com.

Konformist Book Club: The 300 Club

Robalini's Note: With Tim Wakefield having just reached 200 wins and Justin Verlander flirting with the possibility of 30 wins this year with a great playoff run, now is a good time to check out a book on the evolution (and possible extinction) of the 300-game winner...

The 300 Club: Have We Seen the Last of Baseball's 300-Game Winners?
Dan Schlossberg (Author), Wayne Hagin (Author)

List Price: $24.95
Price: $18.02 & eligible for FREE Super Saver Shipping on orders over $25.
You Save: $6.93 (28%)

Since the beginning of Major League Baseball in 1876, only two dozen pitchers have won 300 games. And because of new philosophies about pitch counts, the role of relief pitchers, shrinking strike zones, and five-man rotations, there's a good chance that the 300 Club has admitted its last member.

In The 300 Club - Last of a Breed - author Dan Schlossberg chronicles the most exclusive fraternity in baseball. Beginning with Cy Young and Walter Johnson, the only two players to win more than 400 games, the book reviews the careers of all 24 pitchers in the club. Exclusive interviews with 10 living 300-game winners, including Randy Johnson, Roger Clemens, and Greg Maddux, form the heart of the book. Johnson was the last pitcher to join the club, winning his 300th during the 2009 baseball season.

The book also investigates the very real possibility that no pitcher will win 300 games again. Changes in relief pitching, salaries, starting rotations, and injuries are conspiring to keep the 300 Club "closed." Sprinkled with rare photos from the archives of the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York, this book explains how this unusual collection of 24 men managed to win so many games, and why other standouts, such as Bob Gibson, Don Drysdale, and Sandy Koufax, fell short of the magic number.

The 300 Club is about "the last of a breed," but the book is the first of its kind - a fast-paced and thorough exploration of the best pitchers the game has ever seen.

Hardcover: 288 pages
Publisher: Ascend Books (May 15, 2010)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0984113037
ISBN-13: 978-0984113033

URL: http://www.amazon.com/300-Club-Baseballs-300-Game-Winners/dp/0984113037/thekonformist

Carlos Santana is Booed

Santana is Booed for Using Baseball's Civil Rights Game to Speak Out for Civil Rights


E of S Nation - Please pass along the link!

In struggle and sports

Dave Zirin
http://bit.ly/iuVl66

Major League Baseball’s annual Civil Rights Game was poised to be a migraine-inducing exercise in Orwellian irony. Forget about the fact that Civil Rights was to be honored in Atlanta, where fans root for a team called the Braves and cheer in unison with the ubiquitous "tomahawk chop."

Forget about the fact that the Braves have been embroiled in controversy since pitching coach Roger McDowell aimed violent, homophobic threats at several fans. Forget that this is a team that has done events with Focus on the Family, an organization that is to Civil Rights what Newt Gingrich is to marital fidelity.

The reason Atlanta was such a brutally awkward setting for a Sunday Civil Rights setting, was because Friday saw the Governor of Georgia, Nathan Deal, sign HR 87, a law that shreds the Civil Rights of the state’s Latino population. Modeled after Arizona’s horrific and unconstitutional SB 1070, HR 87 authorizes state and local police the federal powers to demand immigration papers from people they suspect to be undocumented. Those without papers on request will find themselves behind bars. Civil rights hero, Atlanta’s John Lewis has spoken out forcefully against the legislation saying “This is a recipe for discrimination. We’ve come too far to return to the dark past."

But there was Major League Baseball commissioner Bud Selig, celebrating civil rights in the Georgia, and chortling excitedly about the 2011 All-Star game in Arizona. In the hands of Selig, irony becomes arsenic. Thank God that Commisioner Selig was stupid enough to choose the Civil Rights Game to honor, among others, the great musician Carlos Santana. Santana was supposed to be the Latino stand-in, a smiling symbol of baseball’s diversity. And maybe, he would even play a song!

But Bud picked the wrong Latino. Carlos Santana took the microphone and said that he was representing all immigrants. Then Santana added, "The people of Arizona, and the people of Atlanta, Georgia, you should be ashamed of yourselves." In a perfect display of Gov. Nathan Deal’s Georgia, the cheers quickly turned to boos. Yes, Carlos Santana was booed on Civil Rights Day in Atlanta for talking about Civil Rights.

Then in the press box, Santana held an impromptu press conference where he let loose with an improvised speech to rival one of his virtuoso guitar solos. He said, "This law is not correct. It's a cruel law, actually, This is about fear. Stop shucking and jiving. People are afraid we're going to steal your job. No we aren't. You're not going to change sheets and clean toilets. I would invite all Latin people to do nothing for about two weeks so you can see who really, really is running the economy. Who cleans the sheets? Who cleans the toilets? Who babysits? I am here to give voice to the invisible."

He went on to say, "Most people at this point they are either afraid to really say what needs to be said, this is the United States the land of the free. If people want the immigration law to keep passing in every state then everybody should get out and just leave the American Indians here. This is about Civil Rights."

Where was Bud Selig during all this drama? It seems that Selig slunk out of a stadium backdoor in the 5th inning. If there is one thing Bud has become an expert at, it’s ducking his head when the issues of immigration, civil rights, and Major League Baseball collide. If Selig really gave a damn about Civil Rights, he would heed the words of Carlos Santana. He would move the 2011 All-Star Game out of Arizona. He would recognize that the sport of Jackie Robinson, Roberto Clemente and Curt Flood has an obligation to stand for something more than just using their memory to cover up the injustices of the present. If Bud Selig cared about Civil Rights, he would above all else, have to develop something resembling a spine. But if Bud is altogether unfamiliar with the concept of courage, he received one hell of an object lesson from Carlos Santana.

Dave Zirin is the author of “Bad Sports: How Owners are Ruining the Games we Love” (Scribner) and just made the new documentary “Not Just a Game.” Receive his column every week by emailing dave@edgeofsports.com. Contact him at edgeofsports@gmail.com.

Taking Back the Los Angeles Dodgers

Dave Zirin http://www.thenation.com/blog/160162/taking-back-los-angeles-dodgers

On Friday, I wrote a piece for the Los Angeles Times that put forward a common-sense solution to the current ownership disaster that is the Dodgers franchise: public ownership. Last week, Commissioner Bud Selig and Major League Baseball took the unprecedented step of seizing the team from bankrupt chief executive Frank McCourt.

In my column, I asked the question: instead of now selling off this historic franchise to the highest bidder, why not allow the fans to be the new bosses? What if Commissioner Bud Selig and Major League Baseball pursued the solution—that has been so successful for the Green Bay Packers—public ownership? The Dodgers faithful could buy shares in the squad. Then—like in Green Bay—60% of concessions could go to local charities, premium tickets could be made affordable to working class Angelenos, and one of baseball’s most storied teams could repair its ruptured relationship with an alienated fan base. Let Los Angeles be a baseball town again. Let them truly be the people’s team.

It’s unlikely that Major League Baseball or the sclerotic Selig would want any of this. After all, since 1961, it’s been written explicitly in the league’s bylaws that fan ownership is as forbidden as the spitball or aluminum bats. Selig sees his number one job as protecting the profits and interests of ownership—not safeguarding the best interests of the game. Proclaiming to the world that fans can own a team and sports owners are superfluous creatures runs counter to Selig’s very DNA. In other words, I didn’t expect the suggestion to gain much traction at MLB central.

But I also didn’t expect Los Angeles Councilwoman Janice Hahn to step up to the plate and swing for the cause. Hahn, the daughter of former City Supervisor Kenneth Hahn, is now running for US Congress. The day following publication, Hahn cited my piece in the LA Times on her campaign website and issued the following statement: “The Dodgers have been previously owned by FOX and the McCourt family, it is clear that the only ones who have the teams best interest at heart are the fans. If elected to Congress, I will introduce an amended version of the ‘Give Fans A Chance Act’ which would allow Major League Baseball teams to be owned and operated by their fans, much like the Green Bay Packers are structured today.”

This is an idea whose time has come. Major League Baseball for years has relied on public subsidies to make mountainous profits. We have collectivized the debt and privatized the profit for years in operating the National Pastime. But now, as our states face historic cuts, it’s time for payback.

I spoke to 12th grade LA public school teacher Sarah Knopp, and she said,

"Just a percentage of the revenue from merchandise sales could help save the hundreds of art and music teachers being pink-slipped right now. At my small school for at-risk kids, art is one of the main tools that keeps students engaged and practicing higher-order thinking. And we're losing our art teacher. Then there’s physical education. Maybe Dodger revenue could help us to develop world-class sports programs, rather than cutting them. When I was a public school student, girls' sports were crucial for me during those formative years of self-esteem development. I'm scared that a whole generation of girls (and boys) will suffer the effects of not having those opportunities."

The only way this option could be pursued is with a tremendous amount of pressure. This pressure needs to be of two kinds: popular, fan-based pressure on Major League Baseball, and political pressure on—and through—the political powers in LA and California. People should rally, fans should hold up signs, politicians should be questioned, and every union in greater Los Angeles, should back Councilwoman Hahn's call. The Bud Selig alternative involves selling off the team to the highest bidder, with no guarantees this broken franchise would even stay in Los Angeles. Today Selig announced, that former member of the George W. Bush inner circle and Ambassador to Japan J. Thomas Schieffer would be running the team. This is not the right direction for the team or the city. The answer lies not in Bush-Land, but Green Bay.

It should be noted that this franchise was founded when it was stolen from the people of Brooklyn, Then the actual Dodgers Stadium was built on the original sin of the Chavez Ravine land grab. At that time, Chavez Ravine was a beloved residential community of Chicanos known to all as “the poor man’s Shangri La”. Shangri-La was seized by the state and handed over to owner Walter O’Malley. Second base now sits on what was once someone’s house. It’s long past time we take the team back. Doing so would rectify the past, aid the present, and maybe play a part in changing the future.

Dave Zirin is the author of “Bad Sports: How Owners are Ruining the Games we Love” (Scribner) and just made the new documentary “Not Just a Game.” Receive his column every week by emailing dave@edgeofsports.com. Contact him at edgeofsports@gmail.com.

Baseball's blues: It's not just the Dodgers

Dave Zirin
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-zirin-dodgers-20110422,0,4297920.story

Three years ago, I spoke at Fremont High School in South-Central Los Angeles and asked a room of 50 teenagers how many of them had ever been inside Dodger Stadium. One intrepid student raised his hand. To understand why Major League Baseball had to seize the storied franchise this week, look no further than this moment. But it's a moment that could be replicated in cities across the country.

The league takeover of the Los Angeles Dodgers is more than just a comment on owner Frank McCourt's financial problems or the McCourt divorce drama. It's more than a black eye for the onetime franchise of Jackie Robinson, Sandy Koufax and Fernando Valenzuela. It's more than a comment on a club that from 1973 to 1986 led the major leagues in attendance every year except one. It is a commentary on the rotten economic state of Major League Baseball.

As has been widely reported, attendance is significantly down, but that's just the tip of the iceberg. For years, owning a baseball team was like having a license to print money. Public subsidies, luxury boxes and cable deals filled the coffers of owners. Ownership subsidized the lavish conspicuous consumption of Frank and Jamie McCourt. It also created enterprises that are overleveraged sinkholes dependent on tax dollars while pricing out working-class fans.

The evidence isn't pretty, and it goes well beyond Frank McCourt's needing a personal loan from Fox Broadcasting to make the team's payroll. Last year, the World Series-bound Texas Rangers were bought at a bankruptcy bidders' auction in the middle of the season. This season, the New York Mets — playing in the game's largest market — started the year as a husk of a franchise. The team allegedly had been used by owners Fred Wilpon and Saul Katz as a cash register to invest with disgraced financier Bernard Madoff. Now they're being sued for every cent they have by the trustee for Madoff's victims and are looking to unload a piece of the franchise.

These are the most dramatic examples of an industrywide squeeze as the old revenue streams, in these tight economic times, are running dry.

Two years ago, Michigan's then-Gov. Jennifer Granholm described automakers as "a healthcare provider that happened to make cars." For a generation now, baseball has been a highly leveraged real estate urban development plan in which men happen to play a game. Now, young fans are disconnected from the game, and a franchise such as the Dodgers, with all its history and dazzling brilliance, is in receivership. The L.A. Chamber of Commerce has worried that in a worst-case scenario, the team would leave Los Angeles. Although this might provoke cheers in Brooklyn, it would be a tragedy for the game.

MLB Commissioner Bud Selig and the league have no answers about the future of the Dodgers or even baseball in Los Angeles. They don't seem as if they have any long-term answers at all. This unprecedented, jarring response to simply seize the team can only be read as a panic move. Like someone who just throws out everything in the attic rather than sort through the debris, it reads like a reactive response to everything: the McCourt divorce, the inability of a league owner to meet his payroll, questions about security after the tragic near-fatal beating of a rival team's fan on opening day and the need to bring in showboating security specialist and former LAPD Chief William J. Bratton.

It's long been said — whether about steroids, realignment, the All-Star game — that Selig's nickname is "Mr. Reaction." This will do nothing to allay that criticism of his tenure.

The answer to the Dodgers' problems is a somewhat simple one, although enacting it flies in the face of the bylaws of Major League Baseball. The answer isn't found in the glittering Hollywood Hills but in the sparsely populated tundra of Green Bay, Wis. The NFL's Green Bay Packers offer an alluring alternative that couples winning with community connection. The Packers have no embarrassing owners like the McCourts. In fact, they have more than 112,000 owners.

The team is owned by the fans, the only publicly owned, not-for-profit major professional team in the United States. This has created a relationship between team and community unlike any in the NFL. Not only has home field been sold out for two decades, but during snowstorms, the team puts out calls for volunteers to help shovel and is never disappointed by the response.

Could this work in Los Angeles with the Dodgers? Would the fans pony up to make sure that the franchise doesn't leave the City of Angels? Would fan ownership also translate into a deeper connection between the city and the team?

Those are tantalizing questions. But without profound public and political pressure, it's doubtful that Angelenos will get the chance to find out. Considering the generations of civic love bestowed on this team, the people of Los Angeles certainly have a greater claim on the team than Major League Baseball. But then this is also a team founded on the original sin of the Chavez Ravine land grab. Maybe the chickens have just come home to roost.

Dave Zirin is the author of “Bad Sports: How Owners are Ruining the Games we Love” (Scribner) and just made the new documentary “Not Just a Game.” Receive his column every week by emailing dave@edgeofsports.com. Contact him at edgeofsports@gmail.com.

Major League Baseball All-Star Ballot

The MLB All-Star Game ballot is out, sponsored by Sprint. (Old-timers like myself still link it to Gilette.) Here's the URL:

http://www.mlb.com/mlb/events/all_star/y2011/ballot.jsp

FYI, here are my first picks, based on stats as of 4-25-11:

First Base

AL: Miguel Cabrera, Detroit Tigers - .338, 5 HR, 15 RBI
NL: Prince Fielder, Milwaukee Brewers - .345, 3 HR, 22 RBI

Second Base

AL: Robinson Cano, New York Yankees - .304, 4 HR, 14 RBI
NL: Brandon Phillips, Cincinnati Reds - .364, 2 HR, 10 RBI

Shortstop

AL: Asdrubal Cabrera, Cleveland Indians - .253, 4 HR, 14 RBI
NL: Troy Tulowitzki, Colorado Rockies - .317, 7 HR, 16 RBI

Third Base

AL: Alex Rodriguez, New York Yankees - .346, 5 HR, 17 RBI
NL: Chipper Jones, Atlanta Braves - .284, 2 HR, 16 RBI

Catcher

AL: Russell Martin, New York Yankees - .311, 6 HR, 16 RBI
NL: Buster Posey, San Francisco Giants - .280, 4 HR, 16 RBI

Designated Hitter

AL: Travis Hafner, Cleveland Indians - .348, 4 HR, 10 RBI

Outfielders

AL: Jose Bautista, Toronto Blue Jays - .364, 8 HR, 11 RBI
AL: Coco Crisp, Oakland Athletics - .281, 1 HR, 8 RBI
AL: Ichiro Suzuki, Seattle Mariners - .309, 0 HR, 9 RBI

NL: Ryan Braun, Milwaukee Brewers - .378, 8 HR, 20 RBI
NL: Kosuke Fukudome, Chicago Cubs - .478, 0 HR, 2 RBI
NL: Matt Kemp, Los Angeles Dodgers - .396, 5 HR, 18 RBI

The Great American Witch-hunt

Dave Zirin http://www.thenation.com/blog/159935/great-american-witch-hunt-how-barry-bonds-became-convicted-felon

This wasn’t supposed to happen in Barack Obama’s America. We were told that these sorts of prosecutions wouldn’t be the priority of an Eric Holder Justice Department. But just as Guantanamo Bay detention centers and military tribunals have remained in place, the perjury witch-hunt trial of Major League Baseball’s home run king, Barry Lamar Bonds, continued unabated and has now reached a predictably ugly conclusion.

After seven years, and millions of dollars in court costs, Bonds has been found guilty of obstruction of justice. As for the all-important three perjury charges, the jury couldn’t agree whether Bonds lied to a grand jury investigating the Bay Area Laboratory Co-operative (BALCO) when he swore under oath that he never knowingly took performance enhancing drugs. Without corroborating evidence from Bonds’s trainer and lifelong friend Greg Anderson, the jury could was deadlocked and the Judge declared a mistrial on all perjury charges. But the obstruction of justice conviction makes Bonds a convicted felon, and sets him up for a May 20th hearing where he could get as many as 10 years behind bars.

What did Bonds do to “obstruct justice”? According to one juror, “Steve,” the obstruction of justice charge was reached because, "The whole grand jury testimony was a series of evasive answers. There were pointed questions that were asked two or three or four different ways that never got clearly answered. That's how we came to that.'' Wow. Apparently, a “series of evasive answers” lines you up for a 10-year sentence behind bars. By that standard, Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, and Scooter Libby should be breaking rocks in Leavenworth for their performance at the Valerie Plame trial.

As BALCO founder Victor Conte - who is no friend of Bonds - said to USA Today, "This verdict absolutely makes no sense to me. Of all of these counts, the one that makes the least sense to me is the obstruction charge. Tell me how there was obstruction of justice. This is all about the selected persecution of Barry Bonds. This is not fair. I was the heavy in this. I accepted full responsibility and the consequences and went to prison. How is that obstruction? Doesn't make sense.”

It doesn’t. After all the public money, drama, and hysterics, this is what we’re left with. He was “evasive." Keep in mind that we live in a country where the US Department of Justice has not pursued one person for the investment banking fraud that cratered the US economy in 2008. Not one indictment has been issued to a single Bush official on charges of ordering torture or lying to provoke an invasion of Iraq. Instead, we get farcical reality television like the US vs Barry Bonds.

This was a trial where you longed for the somber dignity of a Judge Judy. Since Anderson wouldn’t talk, the government was left with two real witnesses: Kimberly Bell, Bonds mistress, brought in to discuss his sexual dysfunctions resulting from steroids, and Steve Hoskins, the business manager whom Bonds fired for alleged theft and fraud. But their real star was a once-anonymous IRS official named Jeff Novitsky, who has proudly seen Bonds as an all-consuming obsession, U.S. Constitution be damned.

ESPN legal expert Lester Munson described the verdict as “a major triumph for federal agent Jeff Novitzky.” That alone should chill our bones. Without a warrant, Novitzky started his BALCO investigation by rooting through Victor Conte’s trash and taking it back to his house to sift through in his leisure hours. But Conte was a nothing to Novitzky. From the beginning, his sights were on Barry Bonds.

Jonathan Littman of Yahoo! Sports wrote, “two agents working on the case knew that Novitzky ‘hated' Bonds, and heard him brag about his hopes to cash in on a book deal. The agents demanded to see copies of his reports and were rebuffed by federal officials. Novitzky, however, was given carte blanche by the head of the IRS to drop the normal duties of an IRS agent -- investigating tax fraud and money laundering -- and became our de facto national sports doping czar.”

In 2004, accompanied by eleven agents, Novitsky marched into the offices of sports-drug testing monolith Comprehensive Drug Testing. Carrying a warrant which authorized him to see the sealed drug tests of just ten baseball players, he paraded out with 4,000 supposedly confidential medical files, including records for every baseball player in the Major leagues. As Jon Pessah wrote in ESPN the Magazine, "Three federal judges reviewed the raid. One asked, incredulously, if the Fourth Amendment had been repealed. Another, Susan Illston, who has presided over the BALCO trials, called Novitzky's actions a 'callous disregard' for constitutional rights. All three instructed him to return the records. Instead, Novitzky kept the evidence..."

During closing arguments, Bonds’s attorney, Cristina Arguedas, looked at the jury as she pointed at the prosecution, accused them of misconduct and asked, "Why are we even here?"

It’s a good question. But asking the question is much safer than answering it. We’re here because Major League Baseball and the US government has long decided that Barry Bonds would shoulder the burden for the steroid era. We’re here because a surly Black athlete who thinks that the press is just a step above vermin was easy pickings for an industry rife with systemic corruption. Major League Baseball made billions off of the steroid era, an era many now see as a rancid, tainted lie. It was an era where owners became obscenely wealthy and billions in public funds were spent on ballparks. The press cheered and America dug the long ball. Now the dust has cleared, our cities have been looted, Barry Bonds could be going to prison, and Commissioner Bud Selig still has a job - and a RAISE. With apologies to Harvey Dent, this is the story of the Black athlete today: die a hero or live long enough to be a villain. And the men in the suits walk – or in Selig’s case, slouch - all the way to the bank.

Around the start of the trial, nearly a decade ago, Bonds said, "This is something we, as African-American athletes, live with every day. I don't need a headline that says, 'Bonds says there's racism in the game of baseball.' We all know it. It's just that some people don't want to admit it. They're going to play dumb like they don't know what the hell is going on." We shouldn’t play dumb either. Both President Obama and Attorney General Holder said words to the effect that the US government would no longer be in the steroid-inspection business. Like so much else in the last two years, it was just words.

Dave Zirin is the author of “Bad Sports: How Owners are Ruining the Games we Love” (Scribner) and just made the new documentary “Not Just a Game.” Receive his column every week by emailing dave@edgeofsports.com. Contact him at edgeofsports@gmail.com.

Reviewing 'OUT: The Glenn Burke Story'

http://www.thenation.com/blog/155946/reviewing-out-glenn-burke-story

Reviewing 'OUT: The Glenn Burke Story'
Dave Zirin | November 9, 2010

He’s the answer to multiple trivia questions. Who was the only rookie to start in the 1977 World Series? Who invented the high-five? And who was the first Gay Major League Baseball player—to our knowledge—to be out of the closet in the presence of his teammates, if not the fans? The answer to all these questions in Glenn Burke, the subject of a brilliant new documentary, OUT: The Glenn Burke Story [1] (debuting November 10 on Comcast Bay Area, DirecTV’s sports pack channel 696 and Dish Network’s multi-sports package channel 419). In a year of stellar sports documentaries—thanks largely to ESPN’s consistently strong thirty-for-thirty series—OUT is the best I’ve seen. What sets it apart is that it does more than explore an athletic hidden history. It speaks to today’s sports world about the stubborn endurance of the closet in the men’s locker room over the last thirty years.When thinking about LGBT athletes and what they’ve faced, people are very familiar with female jocks like tennis legend Martina Navratilova and basketball star Sheryl Swoopes. Maybe they also know male athletes who in recent years have come out after retirement like NFL player Esera Tuaolo and NBA center John Amaechi. But in Burke we have a story that hasn’t been told, and demands an audience. In the able hands of producer Doug Harris, we learn about an athlete who was more than just a two-sport Oakland Area legend, playing both baseball and hoops with pro potential. He was also a young man, growing up in the Bay, and confident about his sexuality. That confidence, for anyone, was rare back then, but to find it in a male star athlete is remarkable.

As OUT tells us, Glenn’s confidence was put to the test when he made the big leagues. Dodgers teammates like Dusty Baker, Davey Lopes, Reggie Smith, Rick Monday and Manny Mota, tell the story of a player whose sexuality was noticed, recognized and even accepted by some teammates but looked on with horror by management. After all, when you wear a red jockstrap in the locker room, people start to talk. The story where the Dodgers organization offered Glenn $75,000 to get married is particularly gob-smacking. Later when Glenn was traded to Oakland, the pressures intensified. Former Burke teammate Claudell Washington tells this anecdote in OUT: “[A’s Manager Billy Martin] was introducing all the [new] players and then he got to Glenn and said, ‘Oh, by the way, this is Glenn Burke and he’s a faggot.’” By 1980, Glenn was out of the game but the story doesn’t end there. OUT then tells the story of Glenn’s life after baseball: triumphantly coming out to Sport magazine, and Bryant Gumbel on The Today Show; participating in the first Gay Games in 1982, and being a public figure in the San Francisco. scene But then Glenn’s life took a tragic turn as drugs, petty crime and the AIDS epidemic claimed his life. He died in 1995 at the too-young age of 42.

The grand unanswered question that hangs over the documentary is how good could Glenn Burke have been without the relentless pressures of homophobia? To hear Dusty Baker tell it, he could have been truly great. OUT is a must see for anyone who cares about LGBT rights and finally conquering what is in many ways the final frontier of homophobia in our society: the men’s locker room. If anything, by the documentary’s end I felt a sense of deep regret. I regretted that I wasn’t more familiar with Glenn Burke’s story. I regretted that I didn’t have an entire section on his life in my book A People’s History of Sports in the United States. I regretted that this hidden history has been shunted back so deeply in the athletic closet, it’s largely unknown. We owe Doug Harris and the entire team that produced, directed, wrote and researched OUT a tremendous debt. This is the kind of special documentary filmmaking that has the power to change lives. Every high school sports team in the country should watch this remarkable work so the next generation’s Glenn Burke can exist out of the closet and not out of the game.[Dave Zirin is the author of “Bad Sports: How Owners are Ruining the Games we Love” (Scribner) Receive his column every week by emailing dave@edgeofsports.com. Contact him at edgeofsports@gmail.com.

Clemens Shouldn't Have to Take the Fall

In struggle and sports

Dave Z

http://www.nydailynews.com/opinions/2010/08/21/2010-08-21_opinion_roger_clemens_is_no_saint_but_baseball_owners_executives_need_to_be_held.html

Clemens Shouldn't Have to Take the Fall
by Dave Zirin

Roger Clemens is about as popular in baseball circles as jock itch. The man is such a pariah, he makes Barry Bonds look like Justin Bieber. Yet we should hold the cheers over the recent news that Clemens has been indicted on perjury charges for lying in front of Congress on questions related his much-denied steroid use.

However, the real question here is: Why Clemens was dragged in front of Congress in the first place? We can ask the same of Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa and all the players who have been put under the congressional hot lights. To put it bluntly, why have players, and not team owners, been given the third degree? Not one owner has ever been called to account for the steroid era in Major League Baseball. Not one person who has called an owner's box home has had to answer questions about steroid use.

This would be akin to investigating the oil rig workers after the Deepwater Horizon spill, but leaving BP bigwigs untouched. Yes, individual players may have made terrible personal decisions that sullied the game. But there's a systemic problem here, too. And the absence of corporate accountability around this issue is simply breathtaking.

In February 2005, Major League Commissioner Bud Selig — a former team owner himself — made the following statement about steroids: "I [had]never heard about it." That strains credulity to the breaking point. As sports writer D.K. Wilson has noted, "General managers know if a star player reported to spring training at 185 lbs. one season and 215 the next, and whether that newly added 30 pounds was fat or muscle, or a combination of both. As does the team owner — or at least one who's not asleep in the executive suite."

The issue of performance enhancing drugs had been discussed at Major League Baseball's winter ownership meetings as far back as 1988. Assuming he was awake at these meetings, Selig — then owner of the Milwaukee Brewers — would have heard the words of former Cleveland Indians trainer Brent Starr.

"Here's the thing that really bothers me," Starr said in 2007. "They sit there, meaning the commissioners office, Bud Selig and that group...They sit there and say, ‘Well, now that we know that this happened were going to do something about it.' I have notes from the Winter Meetings where the owners group and the players association sat in meetings with the team physicians and team trainers. I was there. And team physicians stood up and said, ‘Look, we need to do something about this. We've got a problem here if we don't do something about it. That was in 1988.'"

The roots of the current crisis lie not in the individual moral failings of players like Clemens, but from systemic greed at the highest levels of the sport. The juicing of the game began in earnest in 1994, when a players' strike mutated into an owners lockout that led to the cancellation of the World Series. The popularity of what was once "America's pastime" sank to a shameful low.

Then, the muscles started coming in — and the bucks along with them. The protracted pitching battles of old were replaced by games that were essentially home run derbies. Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire were, briefly, the heroes of the day. And so, helped by steroids, baseball came back into fashion as a new, juiced-up sport of A-Rod clones. Steroids were simply a quiet part of the marketing plan.

Therefore, despite your personal views on Roger Clemens, it must be acknowledged that the steroid era has been, to paraphrase a famous quote about the criminal justice system, like a magical fishing night that captures the minnows while the whales go free. Even when the minnows are as unpleasant as Clemens, this fundamental truth must be acknowledged.

Zirin is author of the new book "Bad Sports: How Owners Are Ruining the Games We Love." He is also, tragically, a Mets fan.

Harwell 'a true legend in Baseball, in life'

http://mlb.mlb.com/news/article.jsp?ymd=20100504&content_id=9790944

Harwell 'a true legend in Baseball, in life'
Georgia native was iconic voice of the Tigers for 42 years
Jason Beck / MLB.com
05/05/10

"This whole community loves Ernie Harwell, and they should. He's lived a full life, a life of kindness, grace and honor and goodwill."
-- Jack Morris
Tigers pitcher 1977-90

DETROIT -- The man who will forever be the voice of the Tigers is gone, and the Baseball community is left silent in remembrance. Hall of Fame broadcaster Ernie Harwell passed away Tuesday at age 92.

Harwell succumbed to cancer of the bile duct, and passed away at his home in Novi, Mich. Doctors diagnosed the condition as an aggressive form in August, and Harwell and his family decided against surgery at his age. He explained his situation with an extraordinary sense of peace, both to his friends in the community and to fans at Comerica Park when he made one last visit in September.

"I've got a great attitude. I just look forward to a new adventure," Harwell told the Detroit Free Press when he disclosed his illness. "God gives us so many adventures, and I've had some great ones. It's been a terrific life."

It was a new journey, Harwell said, and he was ready for it. Still, many who knew him weren't quite ready to say goodbye.

"We lost a true legend today -- not just in Baseball, but in life," said Christopher Ilitch, president and CEO of Ilitch Holdings Inc, in a statement. "Ernie was one-of-a-kind. He was warm, passionate and had an unmatched love for the game of Baseball... and he also loved Detroit and entire State of Michigan. We were lucky to have Ernie in our lives; he will surely be missed by Baseball fans and anyone who has ever had the privilege to meet him."

Everyone knew this day was coming, but it didn't make it any easier to handle.

"He'll be sorely missed," said former Tigers great Alan Trammell, who appeared with Harwell at a charity event in December. "A lot of people will be mourning, but he didn't want any of us to feel that way. A great life, 92 years old, and I think we all could hope we could live that long. He did it with class, with dignity. It's sad. We shed a tear tonight. He's a great man."

Born Jan. 25, 1918, in Washington, Ga., William Earnest Harwell grew up an aspiring sportswriter, working as a paperboy in Atlanta and as a batboy for the Minor League Atlanta Crackers.

"This son of Georgia was the voice of the Detroit Tigers and one of the game's iconic announcers to fans across America, always representing the best of our national pastime to his generations of listeners," Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig said in a statement.

Harwell was just 16 years old when a letter he sent to The Sporting News led to a freelance job as its Atlanta correspondent. He spent his high school and college years working on the desk at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

He was on his way to becoming a sportswriter, but as he explained later on, life would put him on an unexpected path soon after he graduated from nearby Emory University. With writing jobs in Atlanta hard to find, Harwell auditioned for WSB radio in 1940 and earned a job hosting a sports show. His persistence landed him one of Baseball's most coveted interviews at the time when he won over the reclusive Hall of Famer Ty Cobb.

Soon after, he broke into play-by-play broadcasting with the Crackers, his start in what ultimately became his profession.

"I'm a failed newspaper man myself," he recalled last fall. "I wanted to be a sportswriter when I was younger, working on the [Atlanta] Constitution, doing everything that nobody else would do. Thought maybe I'd be the next Grantland Rice, but it didn't happen. God had another plan for me. Couldn't get a job on the paper, and I got into radio. Stuck with radio and television, and it stuck with me up until 2002."

Harwell honed his broadcasting style with the Crackers, where his conversational style and southern accent took on polish. But it took Baseball's only trade involving a broadcaster to break him into the Major Leagues. The Crackers let Harwell out of his contract to join the Brooklyn Dodgers as a fill-in for Red Barber in 1948 in exchange for Minor League catcher Cliff Dapper.

Harwell would stick in the Majors for more than a half-century. He went from behind the microphone of the Dodgers to the Giants (1950-53) -- Vin Scully succeeded him with the Dodgers -- then to the Orioles (1954-59).

He was a household name in the business well before the Tigers hired him to replace Van Patrick in 1960. In Detroit, however, he found a home, on and off the field. Though he had better than four decades of broadcasting left in him, he was done moving.

"Ernie Harwell was the most popular sports figure in the State of Michigan," Tigers owner Michael Ilitch said in a statement. "He was so genuine in everything that he did -- from his legendary broadcasting to the way he treated the fans and everyone around him. He was truly a gentleman in every sense of the word. Ernie has a special place in the hearts of all Detroit Tigers fans and the memories he created for so many of us will never be forgotten. Baseball lost a legendary voice this evening, and we have all lost a dear friend."

Harwell spent 42 seasons broadcasting in Detroit, where his Georgia tones became part of the sound of Michigan summers. Through Harwell, fans came to know Tiger Stadium by its location on the corner of Michigan and Trumbull, recognized double plays as "two for the price of one," and home runs as "looong gone!" They still associate called third strikes with Harwell's phrase that the batter "stood there like a house by the side of the road."

"I thought that was one of the coolest things, to hear the phrase, 'Long Gone,'" said current Tigers catcher Alex Avila, who came to Detroit as a teenager in time for Harwell's last season in 2002. "I thought that was one of the coolest things about being a Tiger fan when my dad came over [as team vice president] and just kind of getting caught up in all that tradition. That tradition comes alive when you're listening to him."

Countless kids and more than a few adults wondered how Harwell knew the hometowns of so many fans who caught foul balls, whether Ypsilanti, or Sturgis, or whatever town Harwell wished to recognize.

"Ernie Harwell was the biggest professional influence on my career, and the reason I pursued a career in Baseball broadcasting," said Tigers television broadcaster and Michigan native Mario Impemba. "Ernie respected the game and his craft, and in return a whole generation of Tigers fans had a deep respect for Ernie."

The accolades deservedly followed over the years. He was honored with the Ford C. Frick Award from the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1981, earned induction to the Michigan Sports Hall of Fame in 1989, then the radio sports Hall of Fame in 1998. His songwriting skills, more of a side effort he enjoyed rather than a second career, led to more than 60 recordings by various performers.

"Ernie was so engaging," said David Dombrowski, president, CEO and general manager of the Tigers. "He had such a genuine gift of making people feel like he was your friend. Ernie made you feel good about life and brought a smile to everyone he knew. His passion and wisdom during each broadcast gave you insight to his love for the Tigers, and for the State of Michigan."

To those who came in contact with him, whether longtime friends, colleagues, players or fortunate fans, his legacy as a broadcaster is matched by his legacy away from the microphone. He got to know many Tigers players over the years not only through his job, but through an active role with the Baseball Chapel.

"What a gentleman, what a great person," Trammell said. "It's a sad day for Baseball, not just for the people in Detroit or Michigan. He treated everybody with a quality that very few have -- everybody was the same, whether you're the president or somebody on the street. That's a quality not too many people have."

Tigers manager Jim Leyland remembers meeting Harwell when Leyland was a player in Minor League camp for the team. He talked to him again last fall.

"Ernie Harwell treated me like I was a Major League Tiger for a long time," Leyland said, "and I was never a Major League Tiger. I was over there 18 years, and he treated me like I was a big leaguer, and I was never a big leaguer."

Said former broadcasting partner Jim Price: "If you met Ernie for the first time, you'd walk away and felt like you were Ernie's best friend. I mean, that just says it all."

The way he treated his situation, too, touched many.

"I hope that we all can be as at peace with ourselves as much as Ernie was," Leyland said Tuesday. "That's pretty good. I hope I can be like that. Like I said, I look at it like a celebration. He had a full life. He did so many things. He was so respected. He basically had a chance to say his goodbyes. That's a blessing. And we all had a chance to say our goodbyes."

Even those who had never met him until recently, until his illness brought him back into the spotlight, were in awe. The grace and the gratitude with which he stood and faced his condition was one more example for many to admire.

"What a tremendous man," said shortstop Adam Everett, who had the chance to visit Harwell at his home.

As Harwell talked with fans one last time from behind home plate at Comerica Park on Sept. 16, standing tall with his hands politely behind him, he turned his fate into a storybook ending in a way only he could.

"In my almost 92 years on this Earth, the good Lord has blessed me with a great journey," Harwell told fans, "and the blessed part of that journey is that it's going to end here in the great state of Michigan. I deeply appreciate the people of Michigan. I love their grit. I love the way they face life. I love the family values they have. And you Tiger fans are the greatest fans of all."

As Jack Morris said last fall: "He doesn't want people to feel sorry for him. I've never been an outwardly spiritual kind of guy, but I believe. He's going to get there first, and I hope he saves us a seat."

Harwell is survived by Lulu, his wife of 68 years, sons Bill and Gray, daughters Julie and Carolyn, seven grandchildren, and seven great-grandchildren.

Visitation will be at the Comerica Park on Thursday. The viewing will begin at 7 a.m. and continue until the last person has a chance to see him. Complementary parking for the viewing will be available in Lots 1, 2 and 3.

Per Harwell's request, there will be no public memorial, just a private service. Memorial donations will be used for the Detroit Public Library and to fund college scholarships, and can be sent to the Ernie Harwell Foundation, c/o Gary Spicer, 16845 Kercheval Avenue, Grosse Pointe, Mich. 48230.

Jason Beck is a reporter for MLB.com. This story was not subject to the approval of Major League Baseball or its clubs.

Ortiz and Ramirez Said to Be on 2003 Doping List

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/31/sports/baseball/31doping.html

Ortiz and Ramirez Said to Be on 2003 Doping List
By MICHAEL S. SCHMIDT
July 30, 2009

Manny Ramirez and David Ortiz, the sluggers who propelled the Boston Red Sox to end an 86-year World Series championship drought and to capture another title three years later, were among the roughly 100 Major League Baseball players to test positive for performance-enhancing drugs in 2003, according to lawyers with knowledge of the results.

Some of baseball’s most cherished storylines of the past decade have been tainted by performance-enhancing drugs, including the accomplishments of record-setting home run hitters and dominating pitchers. Now, players with Boston’s championship teams of 2004 and 2007 have also been linked to doping.

Baseball first tested for steroids in 2003, and the results from that season were supposed to remain anonymous. But for reasons that have never been made clear, the results were never destroyed and the first batch of positives has come to be known among fans and people in baseball as “the list.” The information was later seized by federal agents investigating the distribution of performance-enhancing drugs to professional athletes, and the test results remain the subject of litigation between the baseball players union and the government.

Five others have been tied to positive tests from that year: Barry Bonds, Alex Rodriguez, Sammy Sosa, Jason Grimsley and David Segui. Bonds, baseball’s career home runs leader, was not on the original list, although federal agents seized his 2003 sample and had it retested. Those results showed the presence of steroids, according to court documents.

The information about Ramirez and Ortiz emerged through interviews with multiple lawyers and others connected to the pending litigation. The lawyers spoke anonymously because the testing information is under seal by a court order. The lawyers did not identify which drugs were detected.

Unlike Ramirez, who recently served a 50-game suspension for violating baseball’s drug policy, Ortiz had not previously been linked to performance-enhancing substances.

Scott Boras, the agent for Ramirez, would not comment Thursday.

Asked about the 2003 drug test on Thursday in Boston, Ortiz shrugged. “I’m not talking about that anymore,” he said. “I have no comment.”

The union has argued that the government illegally seized the 2003 test results, and judges at various levels of the federal court system have weighed whether the government can keep them. The government hopes to question every player on the list to determine where the drugs came from. An appeals court is deliberating the matter, and the losing side is likely to appeal to the United States Supreme Court.

A spokesman for the United States attorney’s office for the Northern District of California, which seized the tests, declined to comment on Thursday. Michael Weiner, the general counsel for the players union, also declined to comment.

One by one, the names of elite players tied to performance-enhancing drugs have surfaced this year. In February, it was Rodriguez and Bonds. In May, it was Ramirez — for the first time. In June, it was Sosa.

Rodriguez had been viewed by some as a clean player who could eventually overtake the career home run record established by Bonds, who had been linked to possible drug use through the federal investigation. Rodriguez subsequently admitted that he used a performance-enhancing substance from 2001 to 2003.

The Times reported in June that Sosa was among those who tested positive in 2003, the first time he had been publicly tied to performance-enhancing drugs. Sosa became a national figure with the Chicago Cubs in 1998, when he and Mark McGwire of the St. Louis Cardinals engaged in a celebrated race to overtake Roger Maris’s single-season home run record of 61. McGwire’s image suffered tremendously when, at a Congressional hearing in 2005, he refused to answer questions about steroid use.

By 2003, Ramirez had long since established himself as one of baseball’s best hitters. Ortiz, however, was less known. In 2002, the Minnesota Twins effectively cut him after failing to trade him. He signed a bargain contract with the Red Sox and began the 2003 season as a backup.

Ortiz quickly blossomed, setting personal highs in home runs (31) and runs batted in (101). He surpassed those numbers in each of the next four seasons.

Ramirez, with his dreadlocks and quirky behavior, and Ortiz, with his gregarious personality and portly build, formed a dynamic tandem on and off the field. They seemed to feed off each other — not to mention demoralize opponents — by hitting back-to-back in the heart of the lineup.

In 2004, they helped the Red Sox overcome a 3-0 series deficit against the Yankees in the American League Championship Series. The Red Sox then swept the St. Louis Cardinals in the World Series to end decades of heartbreak in Boston. Ortiz had a game-winning home run and a game-winning hit against the Yankees and was named the most valuable player of that series. Ramirez was named the World Series M.V.P. after going 7 for 17 at the plate with a home run.

Three years after winning that first title, Ramirez and Ortiz returned Boston to another World Series, where they defeated the Colorado Rockies.

The pairing was split last season when the Red Sox traded Ramirez to the Los Angeles Dodgers after team officials grew concerned that he was not playing hard in response to a contract dispute. In Los Angeles, Ramirez took off again, becoming popular among the fans and leading the Dodgers to the playoffs.

But Ramirez’s hero status in Los Angeles took a hit in May when he was suspended after baseball officials learned that he had been prescribed a fertility drug often used by bodybuilders after they stopped using steroids. When Ramirez was suspended, he issued a statement that appeared to maneuver around his 2003 test results.

“I do want to say one other thing,” Ramirez said. “I’ve taken and passed about 15 drug tests over the past five seasons.”

That five-year period extended back to 2004, which excludes the 2003 test.

Since returning from his suspension, Ramirez has been widely accepted by the home fans. In 48 games this season, he has compiled a .327 average and has hit 11 home runs.

Ortiz, meanwhile, has been in a sharp decline. He had an operation on his wrist last year and missed nearly a third of the season. He started this year in a slump and did not hit his first home run until a month and a half into the season. Since June 1, however, he has hit 12 more home runs.

In 2007, Ortiz said that he used to buy a protein shake in the Dominican Republic when he was younger and did not know if it contained a performance-enhancing drug.

“I don’t do that anymore because they don’t have the approval for that here, so I know that, so I’m off buying things at the GNC back in the Dominican Republic,” Ortiz told The Boston Herald. He added: “I don’t know if I drank something in my youth, not knowing it.”

In February, he said that players who tested positive for steroids should be suspended for an entire season — about 100 games more than the current policy requires for a first offense.

David Waldstein contributing reporting from Boston.

Sammy Sosa and Phony Outrage

When Nuance Dies: Sammy Sosa and Phony Outrage
By Dave Zirin

ESPN’s Howard Bryant is without question one of my favorite sports writers. His book Juicing the Game: Drugs, Power, and the Fight for the Soul of Major League Baseball is one of the finest pieces of journalism I’ve ever encountered. That’s why his frothing take on revelations that retired Major League baseball slugger Sammy Sosa tested positive for performance enhancing drugs in 2003 was both shocking and depressing. Call it “shock-pressing.”

In a piece titled, “Sosa news calls for special outrage,” Bryant writes, “This news should be greeted with the kind of outrage reserved for the worst breaches of trust because you, Mr. and Mrs. Fan, have been taken for a very special kind of ride.”

In a world of economic implosion and war, one might not ascribe “outrage” to the six-year-old drug test of a retired player, but Bryant has no patience for those of us who greeted the Sosa “revelations” with a yawn.

He goes on to mock those who would describe the steroid hysteria as a “witch hunt.” This despite the fact that people like Bonds and Roger Clemens are facing prison terms and track star Marion Jones did hard time, all of which certainly has at least the fragrance of a good old fashioned Salem bonfire.

Bryant also sneers at those who would ascribe steroid use to players "caught up in a culture." This despite the fact that Bryant wrote a 500-page book painstakingly outlining how that culture came into existence.

While he takes a passing shot at the “lazy” writers who let it happen, Bryant reserves perhaps his toughest condemnation for his good friends, “Mr. and Mrs. Fan.” “The fan has been the greatest enabler of the steroids era. Face it: Had the paying customer revolted, the institutional reaction would have been decidedly different.” There you have it sports fans. According to Bryant, you were both taken for a ride and you let it happen. I bet you didn’t know you had that much power.

For the man who wrote the profoundly nuanced Juicing the Game, this is painful analysis. It’s like seeing a great surgeon dispense with the scalpel and go right for the saw. It’s like seeing a ballerina go at it with clogs. It’s like seeing Michael Jordan swing a bat.

The greatest flaw in the piece is not what Bryant writes but what he consciously neglects exploring. Zero accountability is placed on the front office, ownership or management. Who was the General Manager of the Cubs when Sosa was hitting moon shots in Wrigley? Who were his managers? What did they know and when did they know it? Reading Bryant’s screed against spoiled stars, you would think Sosa had his own pharmacy.

Then there is the absent of any kind of context for why players made the decisions to put pharmaceuticals into their bodies. There is no look at the home of Sammy Sosa, the Dominican Republic, where most play without shoes, using cut-out milk cartons for gloves, rolled-up cloth for balls, and sticks and branches for bats. They dream of making it to the baseball academies, places where many Dominican kids first encounter three meals a day or an indoor toilet.

The Dominican Republic is attractive to Major League execs for more reasons than its sunny beaches and never ending supply of prospects. Steroids in the DR are legal. Top prospects can find ways to supplement their skill with a no-risk supply. But those not in the top-tier often take cheaper animal steroids. Minor leaguer Lino Ortiz took this route, went into shock and died.

The entire setup involves billionaires – or their emissaries - telling people from desperately poor backgrounds what to do or have fun in the cane fields. Sure they’re free not to juice. They are also free to go back to the ghetto or back to the island.

Sammy Sosa, before he was even a teenager, stitched soles in a shoe factory for, as he remembered “pennies, just enough to survive.” His choices, as he said, were the cane fields, the army or baseball.

I learned that fact from reading the book Juicing the Game. I learned it from reading Howard Bryant. Whoever wrote this piece, should do the same.

Dave Zirin is the author of “A People’s History of Sports in the United States” (The New Press) Receive his column every week by emailing dave@edgeofsports.com. Contact him at edgeofsports@gmail.com.

Home Runs and Hypocrisy

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090525/zirin

Home Runs and Hypocrisy: The Shaming of Manny Ramirez
By Dave Zirin

You would think that Manny Ramirez was caught fighting pit bulls alongside Martha Stewart.

ESPN's Bill Simmons says that he is "confronting my worst nightmare." Jeff Passan of Yahoo Sports believes that it is time to talk about "lifetime bans." Boston Globe writer Tony Massarotti says, "everyone is guilty until proven innocent."

The sports radio and comment boards have been cesspools of racism. It's always easy to hate, especially someone who plays a game for a living and makes millions of dollars.

All I know is this: thanks to Major League Baseball's hypocritical, idiotic and altogether morally bankrupt steroid policy, the sport will be without one of its premier attractions for fifty games, someone I would pay to watch at batting practice. Yes, Manny Ramirez, the finest right-handed hitter of his generation, has been sent to the showers and forced to surrender $7.7 million in salary after testing positive for what was initially called a "performance-enhancing substance."

The decision ends a stretch where the former World Series MVP was reviving baseball in Los Angeles, leading the Dodgers to a 21-8 start and a record thirteen straight wins at home to open the season. Los Angeles, a town built on artifice and home to hordes of performance-enhanced entertainers, not to mention led by a performance-enhanced governor, now demands purity of its athletes. This is not a column that aims to "defend" Manny Ramirez, but condemn Major League Baseball's steroid idiocy. Besides, the quizzically quirky Ramirez is not at this point defending himself. Ramirez will not appeal the suspension and apologized, issuing a brief statement, which read in part: "I saw a physician for a personal health issue. He gave me a medication, not a steroid, which he thought was okay to give me." But MLB, in a typically classy move, has leaked to the press that Ramirez tested positive for the female fertility drug HCG, or human chorionic gonadotropin. Steroid specialists have fanned out across the airwaves explaining that HCG is used to increase testosterone levels, usually after a heavy steroid cycle.

Former AL MVP, author of Juiced, and admitted steroid user Jose Canseco, who pleaded guilty last November to a misdemeanor of trying to bring HCG across the Mexican border illegally, also weighed in: "It could be that a player used it because he used steroids and went cold-turkey and needed HCG to get his [testoterone] levels back to normal."

The use of a "female fertility drug" also has sports radio hosts in a pubescent tizzy asking if "Manny is a mommy" and ESPN's Jayson Stark making an "octo-mom" joke.

From the juvenile to the pious, President Obama's press flack Robert Gibbs took time out from explaining why torturers are above the law to tell us, "It's a tragedy, it's a shame." There is a tragedy and a shame afoot, but it is not rooted in the choices of one player. It's in a baseball culture that continues to think embarrassing individual players and feeding on the resentment of fans is the best path to cleaning up the sport. Manny has now joined Alex Rodriguez, Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens and many others as permanently stained with a scarlet S. No Hall of Fame, no old timers' games and a life as a cautionary tale.

Meanwhile we all get taken to the cleaners. We have billionaire owners making scapegoats of millionaire players to soothe our anxieties about the game and our lives. Meanwhile these same owners sit like pashas in a baseball palace that could be called the House That Steroids Built.

The man who wrote Juiced knows when a cycle has run its course. Canseco said that he believes the coverage on steroids in baseball has become "overkill" and the spotlight should now be on MLB and the players association. He called it "a complete conspiracy." He's absolutely correct. Baseball owners love conspiracies. For more than twenty years they have conspired to attain public funds for ballparks. In 2008, they collectively conspired not to sign the best hitter in the game, Barry Bonds. Now they are committed to the project of keeping the focus on the players, and off of themselves. We shouldn't let them. If Manny Ramirez is guilty of anything, it's being caught in between baseball's clubhouse culture and public sanctimony.

During the baseball's Summer of Love in 1998, when Mark McGwire hit 70 home runs and Sammy Sosa smacked 66, the money came pouring in. No one cared that McGwire and Sosa looked like a pair of defensive tackles. Soon publicly funded stadiums were included in budgets for Washington, DC, New York City and Minnesota. The home run became the most marketable baseball item since peanuts and crackerjacks and no one wanted to look behind the curtain. It was sports. It was entertainment. It was an escape. Then came 2001, when Barry Bonds hit 73, and all of a sudden we were supposed to be collectively sick at the thought of a home run. As baseball writer Adrian Burgos (Playing America's Game: Baseball, Latinos, and the Color Line) said, "What continues to fascinate me is how MLB leadership is willing to allow individual players to take the full brunt of the collective failure of leadership. Today, pundits have ranted in at times rabid tones about the players who make millions for their role while those who make the hundred of millions (and even have billion- dollar stadiums constructed for them on the public dole) continue to profit. How many stadiums have been built since then and at what cost? All the wealth that has been accumulated at that level is in my mind just as, if not more, offensive, since the owners act as if they were not enablers and co-dependents as their players shot up, ingested and otherwise partook in performance-enhancing drugs."

We should always remember that former Texas Rangers owner George W. Bush made steroid persecution a recurring theme of his time in office, as long as owners were spared the spotlight. The hypocrisy should shame owners toward contrition--but they will happily crack some golden eggs, as long as it means that the goose that laid them lives. Even though come contract time, it's all about the numbers on your stat page, and not the number of clean tests. As baseball fan and poet Martin Espada told me, "Baseball is the Main Street of sports. (Think Cooperstown.) It's full of history and nostalgia, and paved with the bricks of hypocrisy. Now it's the rhetoric of the 'Drug War,' handed down from the Nixon White House forty years ago to MLB and ESPN today."

He is absolutely correct. We are supposed to tsk-tsk at players who are supposed to "just say no" to their addictions to fitness and monster stats, when their success at the park is our addiction as well. We also have yet to truly take owners to task for their addictions to public money and send them to detox.

Dave Zirin is the author of “A People’s History of Sports in the United States” (The New Press) Receive his column every week by emailing dave@edgeofsports.com. Contact him at edgeofsports@gmail.com.

Ramirez suspended 50 games for drug violation

http://sports.yahoo.com/mlb/news;_ylt=AozPbdpnRxDcG.ttoQ3gr6URvLYF?slug=ap-dodgers-ramirez-drugs

Ramirez suspended 50 games for drug violation
By BETH HARRIS and RONALD BLUM, AP Sports Writers
5-7-9

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Manny Ramirez joined a growing lineup of All-Stars linked to drugs Thursday, with the dreadlocked slugger banished for 50 games by a sport that cannot shake free from scandal.

The Los Angeles Dodgers outfielder was suspended by Major League Baseball for a drug violation, adding a further stamp to what will forever be known as the Steroids Era.

“It’s a dark day for baseball and certainly for this organization,” Dodgers general manager Ned Colletti told reporters on the field at Dodger Stadium. “This organization will never condone anything that isn’t clean.”

Ramirez said he did not take steroids and was given medication by a doctor that contained a banned substance. A person familiar with the details of the suspension said Ramirez used the female fertility drug HCG, or human chorionic gonadotropin. The person spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because the banned substance wasn’t announced.

“As tough as it is for us, it’s pretty tough for Manny, too,” Dodgers manager Joe Torre said. “I know he’s the one that did the wrong thing and nobody is trying to cover that up, but it’s still something that I know he’s sorry about.”

HCG is popular among steroid users because it can mitigate the side effects of ending a cycle of the drugs. The body may stop producing testosterone when users go off steroids, which can cause sperm counts to decrease and testicles to shrink.

Ramirez’s suspension was based not on a spring training urine test result but rather evidence obtained afterward, a second person familiar with the suspension said, speaking on condition of anonymity because those details were not released. MLB had concluded the spring test was positive, but the person said the players’ association would have challenged the result because of “testing issues.”

Ranked 17th on the career home run list with 533, Ramirez became the most prominent baseball player to be penalized for drugs. His ban came three months after Alex Rodriguez admitted using steroids, and at a time when Barry Bonds is under federal indictment and Roger Clemens is being investigated by a federal grand jury to determine whether he lied when he told Congress he never used steroids or human growth hormone. And Miguel Tejada was sentenced in March to one year of probation after pleading guilty in federal court to misleading Congress about the use of performance-enhancing drugs.

No matter which way baseball turns, the legitimacy of many of its recent home run and pitching records is being questioned. Sluggers Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa have been tainted by steroid allegations, Rafael Palmeiro tested positive for a banned drug and Jose Canseco said he used them.

In every case, players once believed to be locks for the Hall of Fame may now be locked out.

“You can’t have arguably the greatest pitcher of our era, arguably the two greatest players of our era and now another very, very good player be under this cloud of suspicion and not feel like it has ruined it for everybody,” Atlanta star Chipper Jones said.

“But what are you going to do? You can’t be born in a different era. It is the Steroid Era,” he said.

Colletti and Torre said they found out about Ramirez’s suspension during an early morning phone call from team owner Frank McCourt. Both said they were surprised and saddened at the news.

Torre spoke to the rest of the team during a closed-door meeting before batting practice.

“The mood was sad in the clubhouse,” he said. “You can’t have someone who’s as much of an impact player and personality as Manny missing without it affecting people.”

The 36-year-old Ramirez tried to make amends right away, telling the Dodgers and fans he was sorry for “this whole situation.”

“Recently, I saw a physician for a personal health issue. He gave me a medication, not a steroid, which he thought was OK to give me,” Ramirez said in a statement issued by the players’ union.

“Unfortunately, the medication was banned under our drug policy. Under the policy that mistake is now my responsibility. I have been advised not to say anything more for now. I do want to say one other thing; I’ve taken and passed about 15 drug tests over the past five seasons.”

Baseball added HCG to its list of banned substances last year.

His suspension was first reported by the Los Angeles Times on its Web site.

While Ramirez had little to say, Canseco was quick to explain why someone might use HCG.

“It could be that a player used it because he used steroids and went cold-turkey and needed HCG to get his levels back to normal. I had to use it when I quit steroids cold-turkey,” Canseco, who pleaded guilty last November to a misdemeanor of trying to bring HCG across the Mexican border into the United States illegally, told the AP. “I had to go to a doctor to get it and get my levels back.”

Because MLB imposed the suspension as required by the drug agreement, the Dodgers cannot further discipline Ramirez. He is allowed to work out with the Dodgers but must be out of uniform when the stadium gates open for games.

Ramirez was not mentioned in the Mitchell Report, MLB’s official report on drug use, and there had not been whispers that he was among the sport’s juiced players.

“It’s kind of shocking that he got caught up in anything, honestly. Manny likes to play stupid, but he’s a pretty bright guy. And he’s definitely aware of a lot of things that he tries to act like he’s completely oblivious to,” said Cincinnati pitcher Bronson Arroyo, Ramirez’s former Boston teammate.

Ramirez’s agent, Scott Boras, and the players’ association had gathered materials for a possible appeal to an arbitrator, but Ramirez decided not to file one because he didn’t want to risk missing significant time in the second half of the season, the person familiar with details of the suspension said. The union said merely that he waived his right to contest the suspension.

Reaction to Ramirez’s ban came swiftly, from major league clubhouses to the White House.

“It’s a tragedy. It’s a shame. My sense is, it’s a great embarrassment on Major League Baseball,” White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said.

The penalty left the best team in the majors without its driving force and free spirit for nearly one-third of the season.

Ramirez’s suspension began Thursday, a day after the Dodgers broke the modern major league record for a home winning streak, opening the season 13-0. Barring any postponements, he will be able to return to the Dodgers for the July 3 game at San Diego. Ramirez will lose $7,650,273 of his $25 million salary.

Rodriguez and Ramirez are the two highest-paid players in the majors. With this suspension, six of the top 17 home run hitters in history now have been covered by the cloud of performance-enhancing drugs.

Baseball commissioner Bud Selig couldn’t comment on the suspension because of provisions of the management-union drug agreement, spokesman Rich Levin said.

Ramirez became the fourth player suspended this year under the major league program, following Philadelphia reliever J.C. Romero, Yankees pitcher Sergio Mitre and San Francisco pitcher Kelvin Pichardo.

The Dodgers began the 50-game stretch without Ramirez on Thursday night against Washington. Juan Pierre received loud applause when he was introduced as Ramirez’s replacement in the starting lineup, but there were scattered boos when he came to the plate for the first time.

Losing Ramirez to suspension could be a huge blow financially for the Dodgers. The slugger has been single-handedly responsible for increasing attendance, merchandise sales and interest in the team, besides helping it win the NL West after his late-season arrival in 2008.

Los Angeles even renamed a section of seats in left field at Dodger Stadium “Mannywood” in his honor. Hours after the suspension, the team removed a reference to those seats from its Web site.

Torre, however, insisted Ramirez is welcome anytime.

“The thing that was toughest for Manny is how he disappointed everybody,” he said. “He loved it here, and he loves how the fans get turned on by him. He was devastated.”

Associated Press Baseball Writer Ron Blum reported from New York, with AP Sports Writer Beth Harris in Los Angeles. AP Sports Writers Dan Gelston in Philadelphia, Joe Kay in Cincinnati, R.B. Fallstrom in St. Louis, Stephen Wilson in London and Steve Wine in Miami, National Writer Ben Walker in New York and AP Writer Donna Cassata contributed to this report.