OPINION:
A century ago, baseball faced its darkest hour when eight members of the 1919 American League champion Chicago White Sox accepted bribes to throw the World Series.
The incident is often seen as the end of a more innocent age. References to the scandal can be found in period works such as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby.” The eight were banned from organized baseball and only decades later did what was then truly America’s pastime recover its reputation.
Dozens of books have been written about the scandal. One of the eight, “Shoeless” Joe Jackson, the semi-literate South Carolinian outfielder who Ted Williams contended was the best hitter in the game’s history, was immortalized in the movie “Field of Dreams.” It was to Jackson that a hero-worshiping youngster was reputed to have pleaded, “Say it ain’t so, Joe!” as the centerfielder worked his way through a crowd of fans following the revelations.
On the 100th-year anniversary of that scandal, today’s major league bosses are acting as dishonorably embarrassing as Jackson and his co-conspirators. On Dec. 18, Major League Baseball and the Major League Players Association, the organization representing the players in labor negotiations, announced an agreement with the Cuban government that will deny Cubans who defect the right to play ball in the United States without Cuban government permission and then only if Major League Baseball agrees to pay a major portion of their earnings not to the players, but to the Communist regime in Havana. To fans this means that a portion of the already exorbitant price they pay for tickets to major league games will be going to prop up a totalitarian police state in Cuba.
Baseball and the Cuban government claim this will prevent what they sanctimoniously describe as the “trafficking of Cuban players who wish to play baseball in the United States.” What it actually means is that in the future Cuban players will be held hostage by the Cuban government unless Cuba’s Communist rulers deign to lease them as wholly owned chattel in exchange for cash from major league ball teams in this country. It’s a scheme designed to do away with that pesky free market and guarantee that Cuban athletes can only come to this country as slaves owned by the Cuban regime.
Although Cuban players will earn a fraction of their free market value under the agreement, it also appears that the no guarantee or suggestion that they will be able to bring their families to the United States while they are playing here. The families will apparently remain in Cuba; the better to guarantee the players will behave as the regime demands and return to the island when they finish playing. Communist regimes love to control those beyond their borders through pressure on their families, a fact that doesn’t seem to bother Major League Baseball.
Cuban players already in the United States have to be careful about what they say about the island because their relatives are being monitored if they “misbehave.” It was no doubt with this in mind that Jose Abreu, a star first baseman with today’s Chicago White Sox, obsequiously praised the agreement and actually “thanked” the Communists and his employers. His supportive statement must have been written or reviewed in Havana before it was released.
In many ways, the Cuban regime will, through its wholly owned “Cuban Baseball Federation,” be acting as a pimp prostituting Cuban players whose services are so eagerly sought by major league clubs. It’s a good deal for the Cuban Communists and perhaps even for the major league johns who will no longer have to deal with pesky agents looking for the best deals for their clients. Communist functionaries will no doubt settle for less as long as they get their share.
The players are apparently an afterthought at best with no one speaking for them. They are treated by both sides as property of the Cuban Communist state and as such can be sold, lent out or prostituted for the benefit of Havana. That U.S. baseball owners are willing to accept this and work with a totalitarian regime is to deny talented young men of their earnings and freedom. And what about baseball itself, the quintessential American game so tied to the American family, the Fourth of July, hot dogs and cracker jacks? The game and its fans lose, too, because it has been shown once again to be run by people who care about little other than their bottom line.
Pleading with them to “Say it ain’t so” won’t work because, well, it is.
• David A. Keene is an editor at large for The Washington Times.
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