When you submit a book proposal to a publisher, you typically include a prospective table of contents. If you were to write a book about the economic collapse of 2008 and the era that preceded it what would the chapter titles be?
In my view, one chapter would be titled Baseball.
Baseball?
Yes, because the same dynamic that brought the economy to its knees brought Major League Baseball to its current, embarrassing state.
To buy a house one could not afford with a mortgage one did not rationally qualify for, to package essentially worthless mortgages and sell them to shadowy, unregulated entities that no one has a name for, to buy stocks via Bernie Madoff that only went up, and never down, to expect an ever rising net worth as a birthright observe, with only a slight change in terminology, you have Major League Baseball in the steroid era.
The same greed, the same false expectations, the same house of cards, that drove the economy, drove the national pastime.
It wasnt just baseballs bloated statistics that reflected this. It was baseballs salaries the same numbers, the same philosophy, the same fantasia that drove the stock market and the credit market, drove baseballs salaries.
The pre-fall, 2008 economy, with its spurious fundamentals, found its expression in the pre-Bonds-Clemens-Rodriquez economy of baseball. Banks worked on the Ponzi scheme of artificially sound mortgages; baseball worked on the steroid scheme of artificially productive bodies.
Both generated unearned, unrealistic dollars.
Yes, Baseball is a chapter in the book on the economic collapse that began in the Clinton years, ripened in the Bush years and became visible in the fall of 2008.
Executives on Wall Street received obscene bonuses for failed policies that cost investors billions of dollars; baseball players, such as Alex Rodriquez, received obscene salaries for home run totals achieved with the help of secretly used drugs, as Rodriquez confessed this week.
(Spare me the casuistry that before 2004 steroids were not officially illegal in MLB. If so, why were they used only in secret, and why were they denied, and why are they now a source of shame? Because they were unethical, whatever the law was.)
Bud Selig, the commissioner of baseball, is charged with no crime, unlike Bernie Madoff, who is. But taken as symbols, whats the difference? Both represent high authority with acute knowledge of wrongdoing that did nothing to stop it until circumstances left no choice. In Seligs case, it was the drug tests of 2003 that showed massive fraud in baseball by some 15% of Major League players. In Madoffs case, it was the events of a few days prior to Dec. 12, 2008, when his Ponzi scheme came crashing down.
Yes, baseball and the markets are two sides of one coin, two chapters in the same book.
How would the concluding chapter of this book read?
How a society got derailed. How values degraded. How money assumed more than its rightful place (just like technology). How society came to expect upward mobility as a right. How certain things were no longer earned, just expected how high stock returns, ever growing retirement funds and, for that matter, very cushy retirements buoyed by constant travel, became entitlements.
And how this attitude became pervasive. How its artifact could be a baseball box score the same as a stock listing. How corrupted values insidiously and pervasively affected everyone, or at least the ever growing circle of high rollers, whether in sports, industry or government, whether Alex Rodriquez, Bernie Madoff or Tom Daschle.
Perhaps the perfectly shaped symbol of all this became the ease, the naturalness, with which the newly elected United States president could be asked about a Congressional economic bailout and a confessed baseball steriod user at the same time, in one and the same press conference, his very first one, on February 9, 2009.
