L'Affair Rocker
Road to the White House 2000
March 2, 2000
Dear Future,
I'm going to have to recap this episode for you, boring as it is at present, since I'm fairly certain it will have been completely forgotten soon enough. Of course, present-day readers would find this sickeningly boring, it's been done to death so much.
I'm speaking of both L'affair Rocker, and the Presidential Campaign in the year 2000. I'm hoping to help future historians get their wires uncrossed in sorting out these two cause celebres from one another.
Last year, the Atlanta Braves promoted one of their young arms to the job of Closer, a kid named John Rocker. He had all those characteristics we of this generation have come to associate with a dominant closer: snotty, arrogant, can't-lose-attitude, clearly a few screws short of a load (so much the better to surpress his fear and inspire it in batters), a 100-MPH fastball, and equal lefty-right splits even though he throws left-handed.
The guy really was just a kid last year, 24, and showed every bit of it. Big head, big mouth, bit of country manner to him. Despite his tender years and somewhat raw state, he was a good match for the modern role of stopper.
The Braves have shown no shyness about plugging people into the role in sequence: they've had eight "closers" in the last nine seasons, and still have won the division title every year since '91. But there was a feeling the Braves couldn't "win the big one" because they didn't have one of the classic closer archetypes of this era. Rocker did his part last year, getting better towards the end of the season, and not giving up a run in the playoffs or world series. In short, he looked in October for all the world like he was the next Dibble or Billy Wagner.
However, somebody failed to clue Rocker in that a lot of the hype in the world of Pro Sports should not be taken seriously, either about yourself or your place in the universe. Two things happened as a consequence. Rocker got himself very worked up in series in New York, one for the Mets, one for the Yankees. This in turn allowed him to be baited by the press and the fans, and they like doing that stuff in New York. Then, Sports Illustrated (you may have to look it up in your library, Future) did a kind of a sandbag interview with Rocker that was published in December -- the Christmas season, no less, tht time of Peace and Goodwill towards men that's also the nadir of news availability during the hot stove league -- that allowed Rocker the opportunity to shoot his mouth off to get back at the New Yorkers who called him names and threw batteries at him.
The comments, while primarily cast in the media as being racist, were actually a random collection of sophomoric insults about the caricature of life and the people in New York, showing a bit of homophobia, xenophobia, welfare-mom-phobia, and a tinge of racism, although the latter was, in point of fact, only directed explicitly at Asians. In short, very much like the Republican party these days. More on that in a sec.
Rocker's a small-town kid from Macon, who certainly in his personal conduct doesn't appear to be a classic bigot. He's had pals of all ilks come forward to say he doesn't comport himself as such in real life. In context, Rocker seems to have convinced himself that the killer-closer persona has a few pre-requisites, such as setting yourself up in opposition to, well, your opponent. (The media, of course, only plays off that, so you can see where somebody without too much sophistication might pick up on this idea.) For a small-town kid growing up in jock culture, what could be more antithetical than the complex multifaceted culture of New York and its various embodiments? He's supposed to mow-down their hitters, mute the boos of their crowds, why not defend the South against the Yankees?
So, as a quick recap: there were a lot of calls for Rocker's head, some of them literal, ranging from teammates who were insulted by him to "civil rights leaders" who saw Rocker as an easy way to attack the vulnerable but monolithic target of major league baseball and its corporate, antitrust-immune, stodgy self, to the guy on the street who probably didn't want to hear about it in the first place but sure buys a lot of papers. There was so much intolerance of Rocker shown by those defending tolerance, it's hard to say whether this shows society went a step forward or backward.
The Czar of Baseball, Bud Selig, tried to suspend Rocker for all of spring training and a month of the season, which is a kind of modified death sentence for a pitcher needing to face live batters to stay competent. Between the local political pressure, the potential impact on their marketability and ratings on WTBS, and the uncertainty about Rocker's future effectiveness, the Braves baled on him and tried shopping him around on the trade market while this penalty was being appealed. Rather a biblical washing of the hands in some ways.
I should note that it's widely believed, at least behind the scenes, that Selig issued this penalty not out of some kind of new-found distaste for those with bigoted ideas, but as the opening shot in the coming round of labor battles. By forcing the Union to defend the indefensible Rocker on the basis of the unprecedented severity of the penalty imposed, Selig has put the Union as a defender of Rocker's comments in the eyes of Joe Sixpack. The fact that major league baseball has said nothing about racist symbols used by the Braves and Indians, nor has any kind of stated policy whatsoever on AIDS or tolerance of homosexuality, strongly suggests that accusing major league baseball of simple hypocrisy would be putting it kindly.
To wrap up Rocker's end of this story, the suspension was reduced to two weeks (still a lot compared to Robby Alomar's getting three games off for spitting on an umpire, or Armando Benitez getting five games for deliberately trying to hit somebody with a fastball with intention to harm him), and he's issued what seems like a sincere if unprofessionally-delivered (and therefore subject to guesses as to its genuineness) apology, and his teammates all seem to be on record as willing to give him a chance.
The Braves may apparently still try to trade him, but the whole thing is going to largely depend not on the wrongs Rocker may have done or his contrition about same, but the impact on marketability of the ballclub and baseball as a whole. I suspect it will die down over time, since there will soon be real baseball to report on, and Rocker will have to endure a couple of years of serious riding from the stands and the bench (again, witness fighting intolerance with intolerance). He may have to do it outside of Atlanta, if the political/economic side comes into it.
Here's where the worst form of hypocrisy is present. Well, not the worst: that comes later.
Major league baseball is much more racist and bigoted as an insitution. It makes money off racist caricatures of Native Americans via the Cleveland Indians and Atlanta Braves. It exploits 15-year-old migrant labor, also called illegally-signed kids from the Dominican Republic, with only minor penalties to the clubs who are caught violating MLB's own rules. (These kids are paid less than minimum wage to populate rookie league teams; very few of them make it up to the bigs, fewer still ever graduate from high school.) Czar Selig declined to even fine the Tigers for violating MLB's own rules in not interviewing *any* minority candidates for the manager or front office jobs open this off-season. It hardly has been at the front of civil rights for homosexuals, or crusading for the rights of welfare recipients, that it can take the moral high ground on these subjects.
In short, they really only seem worried about their public image, not right and wrong. At least the poor blithering Rocker is suffering personally. MLB will do anything not to suffer in the pocketbook.
Which leads me to the other completely outrageous aspect of this whole issue. While you can't entirely blame the sporting media for making too much out of this story, given it sells papers and webspace, and there were virtually no stories to speak of in the off-season until Griffey got traded to Cincinnati, in context, Rocker's story is nothing, it's peanuts, it's a tiny pebble in the ocean.
This is 2000, a presidential election year. Bookending L'affair Rocker has been the spectre of two major candidates, John McCain and George W. Bush, traipsing through South Carolina in the midst of a conflict about the State continuing to fly the confederate flag on the state house.
Let's do a quick review: the Confederacy was an attempt, through use of violence, to permanently override the Constitution of the United States, with the more specific end goals of not only continuing to hold other human beings in servitude, but to perpetuate a class system fundamentally incompatible with democracy and our most basic understanding of human rights. Later, it was adopted as the symbol of a large number of groups fairly direct about their racist beliefs, from the Ku Klux Klan to the American Nazi party.
Let's recap as well what a symbol is. A symbol is a shorthand for a lot of words and beliefs. Those beliefs usually in some way or another get translated into actions. I show you the symbol of a stop sign, your action becomes stopping our car. I show you an American flag in the right context, you put your hand over your heart. Or fall on a grenade to save a buddy, by philosophical extension. Symbols are at the heart of human beings' ability to take great abstractions and form them into concrete activity.
It's one thing for private citizens or groups to use this symbol, the Confederate flag. That's called freedom of speech, and we've got that self-same Constitution to prevent Congress and so forth from preventing this kind of private expression. It's the same rule of law that makes Chief Wahoo legal. It's quite another for a state, especially one with a kind of poor track record in the whole Civil War thing, to use it as an official symbol. When the state does it, it provides a form of validation that the ideals represented by the symbol are in place in that building. And it surely implies that the actions of the state will be made in accord with the symbol's meaning.
Lest anybody accuse me of being some igorant Yankee carpetbagger who just doesn't get it, my father's family was oldschool south, part of it from South Carolina. I've got a ton of dead ancestors who fought on both sides in the late conflict, with a tad more on the losing side, including Robert E. Lee. While the historical record is weak, we've strong intimations we had more slave-holders than abolitionists in our diverse family tree. Yet I don't hate my roots just because I hate the ideals my ancestors stood for. The same way I don't discount the great baseball performance of Ty Cobb just because he was a virulent racist. One has to separate the achievement from its milieu, otherwise we'll end up hating everything humans have ever done. [more]
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Now, I won't get into the idea that some well-meaning dunderheads in South Carolina actually believe the flag stands for the valor of their ancestors in combat, fighting for a failed but somehow glorious ideology. The point is that every other person on the planet sees the Confederate flag as a symbol for, well, the Confederacy and racism. And isn't perception what we're talking about in the Rocker thing?
Both McCain and Bush took the mushy stance that they were going to "leave [the flag issue] up to the people of South Carolina", refusing to say one way or another if they thought the flag of sedition and treason should fly. Of course, they'd have no power as President to do anything about it -- except for setting the moral imperative, as they've been harping on the present administration to do on every other issue under the sun. That does count for something. More to the point, if they can't openly condemn THE symbol of treason in the history of the United States, how can they be expected to take much more difficult stands on moral, ethical, political, and legal issues as President? Shouldn't it be a really easy no-brainer to say that the wrong symbols are bad, because they send the wrong message, because the wrong message too often ends up in wrongful action? Or are they saving themselves to talk about Monica Lewinsky's dress in the upcoming campaign in the fall?
Bush only rubbed salt in the wound by using Bob Jones University as a stump spot during his campaign. Bob Jones is what you'd call an Old School school. They ban interracial dating there, among other things. They're anti-catholicism at old Bob Jones, which as a religious school of different ideology they've a right to be, but it's a very thin line between being against Catholic ideology and acting against Catholics. (Let us remember that prior to the Civil war, one of the issues in the South was the perceived increase in the influence of Catholics in Northern politics; the last political coalitions between North and South prior to the war were united by an openly anti-Catholic stance. So the issues are in fact linked.)
Bush clearly was trying to send a message that 'hey, I'm one of you' to get out the vote in South Carolina. He only partially apologized for the visit after the primary was over, which is almost the definition of pandering prior to the fact. He now tries to make political capital out of McCain calling him on this extreme behavior, accusing McCain of accusing Bush of anti-Catholicism. (I wonder if Bush has ever heard the phrase, if you lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas?)
Of course, McCain told reporters on his campaign bus that he can tell a homosexual just by the way they look and talk, and is equally virulent against "special rights" for homosexuals in society. Bush in turn has accused McCain through proxies of being "liberal" by not condemning the homosexual 'lifestyle' more openly.
In short, by deed and action, by the company they keep, by their failure to actually speak to issues of bigotry in real life, McCain and Bush have been far more hurtful and offensive than Rocker ever could be. At worst, Rocker's made a lot of baseball fans uncomfortable. One of these other jokers may be the supreme political leader of the entire country.
There's my bigger problem. For every column inch or minute of broadcast time we've had on the bigotry of these candidates, we've had twenty on Rocker. It seems to me we're a society with screwed up priorities about the issues if we condemn a loudmouth kid of 24 who shouldn't have even had a public forum in the first place for relatively mild comments, but don't hold the men on the biggest soapbox in the country accountable for their more hateful words and deeds.
I find it encouraging that on the simple, person-to-person level, Rocker has to seek absolution and understanding of the meaning behind his off-hand comments by being forced to deal with teammates from different countries, cultures, and credos. And those teammates have shown a capacity to forgive and perhaps eventually forget. His employer may yet get rid of him as an embarrassment to their corporate image, and that would be a pity, since it's a great opportunity for him in some ways.
What's discouraging is that few people immediately involved with the sport I love seem to be looking at the big picture. Ted Turner, for instance, owner of the Braves, who's been identified with various liberals over the years, who's a bigwig in Atlanta, and has as much power as anybody on the planet to get himself a media forum, would be the perfect person to point out that wrong as Rocker was, we've got bigger problems, and they're on the road to the White House. (One of the strange ironies of this whole affair is that the same part-Turner-owned media conglomerate that broke the story, Time-Warner, which owns Sports Illustrated, which profited most from L'affair Rocker, also owns CNN and related news outlets, which profits the most from the Presidential horse race. So it's not like this wasn't all under one house.)
Baseball, like any industry fueled by mythology (cf. Hollywood, the Military, organized Religion), is clearly obsessed with this issue only with respect to its own bottom line. If it were in the business of encouraging tolerance and making people feel good about one another, it would've started by cleaning its own house and then working on the hearts and minds of its employees, like Rocker. I think this blame-Rocker-first approach is roughly akin to the Air Force general who got full retirement after committing adultery with a subordinate officer's wife, while the unmarried female Air Force Lieutenant who had a consensual affair with a married civilian got cashiered. (This actually happened, Future, a few years ago, the two incidents in the same month.) Only Bud Selig is still Commissioner.
But so it goes in private life. Even though it's an entertainment industry, one heavily subsidized in many areas by local government, Baseball is private life. Rocker's comments, made in a public forum, were personal comments. When a person who would be our President speaks, or fails to speak out against, particular symbols, words, or actions, by omission or commission they are speaking to the public life of this country. That is far more worthy of time and consideration than a kid who can throw a 100-mph fastball.
To paraphrase the great Bill Lee, if Left-handers aren't in their right mind, Right-Wingers, it seems, are out in Left Field.
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