Disillusionment'¦ that's what baseball is feeling right now.
It's the feeling that the way you saw the world wasn't the way the world was. In the wake of Alex Rodriguez's confession that he took performance-enhancing drugs, this is the problem baseball its fans and the people who cover it, are trying to wrap their collective minds around.
Many great stars have fallen from grace in recent years, but Rodriguez had been built up in such a different way. First it was Sammy Sosa and Mark McGuire, but by the time they were exposed their profiles had already been badly diminished.
Then came the allegations about Barry Bonds, but writing him off was easy because Bonds was'¦ well'¦ an ass to almost everyone he met. With Roger Clemens, the accusations came as a shock, but it could be rationalized because he was a surly player who threw at people's heads (and the fact that he had an affair with a 15-year-old at 28 doesn't help).
Rodriguez's legacy, however, took a turn when Bonds passed Hank Aaron as all-time home run king. Suddenly it fell to him to purify the sport's most important record.
He was a Yankee, always a qualification for greatness, and we overlooked his many flaws. He was baseball's symbol for greed when he signed a quarter-billion dollar contract. He cheated on his wife. But when it became clear he had the best chance of taking down Bonds, he could do no wrong.
Those who follow baseball allowed this vision of Rodriguez cloud the fact that he played in the steroid era, on the Texas Rangers, a team that boasted several of the highest-profile steroid users.
The total confusion at Rodriguez's admission stems from people around the game wanting so badly to believe that there was something pure in the sport that they built an illusion around one player.
That theme of disillusionment, however, goes deeper than just a few players. It cuts to the struggle between how baseball wants to view itself and the way the sport actually is.
The imagined world of baseball is a rural game filled with larger-than-life athletic heroes and personalities. Think of it as some sort of fusion between Field of Dreams"" and ""The Natural"" where there is something magical about the game.
The players were All-American guys like Babe Ruth, Mickey Mantle and Aaron. The only problem is that this mythology is completely disconnected from the real world.
Aaron regularly used performance-enhancing drugs called greenies. Mantle was an alcoholic and a womanizer.
Baseball as a sport glorified acts of cheating, sign stealing and doctoring baseballs. Gaylord Perry was renowned for greasing up baseballs with Vaseline and even mentioned the illegal spitball in the title of his autobiography, ""Me and the Spitter.""
Perry, despite his indiscretions, was inducted into the hall of fame in 1991.
Baseball's history features eras of racism and rampant drug use and has scores of all-time greats who were bigots (Ty Cobb), boozers, drug users and many characters so cold, arrogant and unpleasant to those around them, it's a wonder they are still given respect.
Writers back then built players up as near-mythological heroes, something that is not the case anymore.
So how does this affect baseball in the present day?
First and foremost, the last 15 to 20 years cannot just be written off as an era full of cheaters unfit to be grouped with the rest of the sport's history.
Similarly, the players who cheated cannot simply be blackballed, because it takes away from the prevalent use of PEDs and gives credit to those who were lucky enough not to get caught.
Instead, fans need to just accept the steroid era for what it is, another part of baseball history, no less flawed than many previous eras. Bonds, A-Rod and Clemens should be in the Hall of Fame, because, even without the juice, they were great enough to be worthy of that honor.
As for the numbers and records that many hold so sacred, they've been so tweaked and changed by shifts in the game that comparing numbers from different times is useless. The game is just as flawed as it's always been, and in that, hopefully, fans can still find the beauty and joy many generations before them have found in baseball.
Think Rodriguez juicing shatters any faith you have in baseball players? Talk to Ben about it at breiner@wisc.edu.
