Tartans

“If you can hit the curve ball, you can get away with murder.”—Baseball axiom

It is time to look at the other side of the coin—for the sake of argument, let’s state that MLB is not colluding against Barry Lamar Bonds. With that out of the way, what have we learned from the fact that every club of its own accord simply said no to signing him?

We know it wasn't a question of his talent or potential production; it was about what went along with it.

There have been a lot of nasty people employed by major league baseball teams. In recent years, there have been players that have been busted for tax evasion, dealing cocaine, abusing women, being polygamists, making death threats against their family (including children), having sexual relations with underage girls, using steroid, getting ticketed for DUI, being drug addicts and felons, being accused of sexual assault and rape, being vocal racists etc.

There have been players reviled by other players; in May 2006, Sports Illustrated featured an anonymous survey taken among 470 baseball players about what player they would most like to see get hit in the head by a pitch. White Sox catcher A.J. Pierzynski received 18 percent of the vote, the highest total of any player. Forty-two percent of those surveyed in the AL Central Division voted for him.

Shea Hillenbrand often clashed with others; Carl Everett, Jeff Kent and Milton Bradley have their share of detractors. We have heard of any number of players who had the “clubhouse cancer” tagged on them at various points. Back in the 1970s Dick Allen was so divisive a personality that when the Phillies won the NL East the team had two post-game celebrations—one for friends of Dick Allen and one for the rest of the club. Of more recent vintage, when the Mets were losing the final game of the 1999 NLCS, the team came back into the clubhouse to the sight of Rickey Henderson and Bobby Bonilla unconcernedly playing cards.

In 2003, the despised John Rocker posted an appropriate ERA of 6.66 in 24.1 IP—although he struck out 34, he had a BB/9 4.8, a H/9 of 10.73, and a HR/9 of 1.85. (Bert Blyleven had a HR/9 of 1.69 in the season he gave up 50 jacks.) Despite the baggage, he was a lefty coming off a season where he posted a K/9 of 11.1 so the Devil Rays gave him a shot at a bullpen job.

To go back further in history, Ty Cobb was a man who bragged about killing someone; he once assaulted a physically challenged heckler in the stands and was generally thought to be a psychopath. Rogers Hornsby was reviled as both a player and a manager—it was people like this who gave to the saying “If you can hit the curveball, you can get away with murder.”

I could go on.

The fact of the matter is, the game has a long list of anti-social deviants and obnoxious personalities, yet as long as some of their skills were intact (or at least perceived to be) some team was willing to take a flyer on them, clubhouse issues and fan reaction be damned.

However, there now exists a player so obnoxious that he trumps all that, a player so toxic that teams feel fans will stay away from the park and turn off their TVs and radios in disgust should he be brought on board even though no player has ever before triggered such a reaction in the marketplace. This player is so evil that even though in a 22-year career played on 13 winning teams—eight of which reached the post season—he would so completely destroy the atmosphere of a club that it would sink from potential contender to also-ran.

The men who feel this way have denied communities tens of billions of dollars in tax money that could be used for schools, libraries, children’s shelters and services and the like in order to enrich themselves even further, have had no qualms about presenting deliberate misinformation to the federal g