Summary of “Cheating and CHEATING”
Joe Posnanski is a fan of baseball. And in his essay “Cheating and CHEATING” he wants baseball fans to be clear, at any point in the history of baseball, there was a lot of cheating an money grabbing happening at all levels of baseball. From people taking amphetamines, to stealing signs, to fixing games, baseball has its heroes, but it demonize for cheating, since it was a baseball proverb of the time that “If you’re not cheating, you’re not trying” (Posnanski, 556). Joe Posnanski believes that he and Pete Hamill believe in baseball, but they have different versions of how it has played out over its history.
Posnanski is a fan of both the writer on the subject of Pete Hamill’s book on baseball player Willie Mays. However, he is critical of Hamill playing the bygone era card when reminiscing about the time that Mays played. He finds it ludicrous that Hamill would praise steroid use today and forget the frequent amphetamine use of the past. Mays, the subject, has all but conceded that he was using amphetamines when he asked for “vitamins” from his doctor.
Posnanski does not believe that drug-use, which has always been a part of baseball need diminish people’s enjoyment of baseball. But he does not believe that we should recreate baseball’s history to portray the past as a time that was innocent of these problems. Posnanski believes that Hamill chooses to create his version of past events in baseball in order to avoid the untoward things happening since it’s humble origins. Posnanski loves baseball but does not want that affection to blind him from the realities of it. He believes that there is nothing contradictory about praising baseball and its players for their merits while acknowledging some of baseball’s greatest feats were preformed with the help of performance enhancing drugs.
Posnanski is unable to enjoy Hamill’s reminiscing about the past that occurred otherwise. He begins his essay with an illustrating quotation from Hamill’s book, “Above all, the story of Willie Mays reminds us of a time when the only performance-enhancing drug was joy” (Posnanski, 553). This romanticizing of the past is not just something that happens when looking back on the game of baseball. IT is ubiquitous to hear about people romanticizing the 50s for its clean morality, but to do so forgets that at the same time blacks were being segregated, marginalized and discriminated against.
What romanticizing the past does to the game of baseball is that it creates the misinformed perspective that today is an inferior time for baseball and the past contained baseball’s golden years. In the past, some player played fairly, and some looked for unfair advantages. Nothing has changed about the way the game is played today. Posnanski’s criticism is “not meant in ay way to diminish the great Willie Mays or cheapen the wonderful time when eh played baseball. Ways was wonderful. Baseball was wonderful” (Posnanski, 558).
Perhaps what has changed and what is left unmentioned by both Hamill and Posnanski is that what has changed is the public access to the performance enhancing drugs being taken outside of the reach of the public eye. Just as politicians of today’s age face a different brand of journalists, baseball is now under a microscope that it previously wasn’t. Under this microscope, players are regularly tested, and violations are reported to the public. There is a public talk about performance-enhancing drugs today that did not take place fifty years ago. It takes in today’s game, a brazen player to continue to take performance drugs. One area where Hamill might have a strong point is that in the past the boundaries were less clearly defined. Players may have taken performance-enhancing drugs, but there had yet to have been any public scandal or outcry over it. What has changed is that the ignorance fans could have enjoyed in their past regarding their heroes no longer exists today. Perhaps Hamill is mistaking the perception of innocence with actual innocence. Under such conditions, Posnanski decides to drive a hard bargain when it comes to criticizing Hamill’s book on Willie Mays.
Baseball is as archetypical American as Apple pie. Just like American history is sometimes presented with America as a protagonists in propaganda-imbued history books, there is the innocence that people remember, and the actually story of what was going on behind the dugout in Baseball’s past. Posnanski is not just a baseball fan, but a sports journalist who believes it is important to get the fact straight to tell the truth of what really occurred. Posnanski’s criticism of Hamill is that he romanticizes baseball’s history and Willie May’s role in that by omitting certain unwanted details. But these details, Posnanski argues in his essay, are what is necessary to understand baseball of the present. If we re-write history to fit with our romanticism, then baseball in the present is unfairly diminished by an ideal that never existed in the real world. Posnanski believes that the truth can set us free and that there is nothing contradictory about being a lover of baseball while admitting its problems past and present. They both love baseball, but Hamill is reluctant to see baseball’s flaws in her early years.
Work Cited
Posnanski, Joe “Cheating and CHEATING” Print. 2012
