The fastball left Matt Harrison’s hand at 93 miles per hour, headed for
the inner half of the plate, belt high. This was the All-Star Game, last
month in Kansas City, and any hitter might have done what Melky Cabrera did to that pitch: lash it on a line into the left-field bullpen for a home run.
Major League Baseball
Melky Cabrera, 28, is hitting .346 with 11 home runs and 60 runs batted in.Cabrera alone did not win the game for the National League — the score was 8-0 — but he was the best player on the field. He went 2 for 3 and earned the Most Valuable Player award, a crystal bat named for Ted Williams. With his mother and grandmother by his side, he thanked the fans of Kansas City, where he played last season, and the fans of his new team, the San Francisco Giants, who voted him to start.
“I think the one person that has the most influence on me is the Lord,”
Cabrera said that night. “He is the one that embraced me in terms of
playing better.”
Harrison had to stand there and take it. It was his first All-Star Game,
too, a reward for a strong first half in which he bounced back from
losing Game 7 of the World Series. That was a road game for the Texas
Rangers, in St. Louis, and they had hoped to secure home-field advantage
this season with a victory in Kansas City. Not so.
On Wednesday, Major League Baseball suspended Cabrera for 50 games after
he tested positive for testosterone, a banned substance. Cabrera
acknowledged his guilt in a statement, apologizing for using a substance
he should not have used.
“Anytime you hear about something like that, with someone that’s had
success against you, it’s disappointing,” Harrison said Wednesday by his
locker in the Rangers’ clubhouse at Yankee Stadium. “You know that they
got a little advantage over you because of something they took. But at
the same time, it’s over with now. You move on. That’s something he has
to deal with. It’s not my issue.”
Yes and no. If you follow baseball and care about it, and certainly if you play it, it is your issue, too.
The last generation is so stained by steroid use that three headliners
on this winter’s Hall of Fame ballot — Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens and
Sammy Sosa — are unlikely to be elected. So the career home run leader,
the only seven-time Cy Young Award winner and the only man with three
60-homer seasons would be left out of Cooperstown, at least initially, a
searing indictment of the era.
The game has the power to amaze and inspire, to rise instantly above the
bad news. Just hours after the Cabrera suspension came down Wednesday,
Felix Hernandez tossed a perfect game under glorious Seattle sunshine.
But the cheats keep pulling baseball down.
“You’re surprised, that goes without saying,” said a former teammate of
Cabrera, the Yankees’ Derek Jeter. “That’s the initial reaction. You
feel bad. You feel bad that you even have to be sitting here talking
about it.”
The Cabrera suspension, Jeter said, at least shows that the system
works. And M.L.B., on some level, is certainly glad to have a clear
victory after losing the Ryan Braun arbitration hearing in the spring.
Braun tested positive for testosterone after a playoff game last
October, but he avoided a 50-game ban by challenging the collection procedure.
Still, Braun’s Milwaukee Brewers won that playoff series, and the next
month he was named the National League M.V.P. Just as Harrison cannot go
back in time to face a different hitter at the All-Star Game, the
Arizona Diamondbacks must live with the outcome of a playoff series
during which the other team’s star player hit .500 while testing
positive for testosterone.
“I’m sure they were pretty upset once they found out,” Harrison said.
“He pretty much beat them himself in the playoffs.”
Cabrera’s transgression, at least, will cost his team. The Giants are
now a game back of first place in the N.L. West and have lost Cabrera
for the rest of the regular season, in addition to the first five games
of the playoffs, should they qualify.
But Cabrera is entering free agency in the off-season, and surely he has
cost himself dearly. Nobody truly knows if Cabrera is an All-Star in
peak physical condition, or the doughy bodied, rather ordinary player he
was for the Yankees and the Atlanta Braves.
The Yankees’ Alex Rodriguez, who has admitted using steroids when he played for the Rangers, encouraged Cabrera to work out with him
after the 2010 season. This is not unusual for Rodriguez, who has
worked out with other young players, like Kansas City’s Eric Hosmer and
Baltimore’s Manny Machado, during off-seasons in Miami.
The results were immediate for Cabrera, who had 201 hits for the Royals
in 2011. Kansas City was unconvinced, trading Cabrera for pitcher
Jonathan Sanchez, yet Cabrera seemed to cement his star status this
season. His positive test, of course, makes you wonder how it really
happened.
“It’s not my job to sit here and speculate,” Rodriguez said. “I saw
someone who had a great run with us. He was a huge part of our world
championship year in ’09, had a down year in Atlanta and decided to take
his career and work extremely hard, and I saw him do that. He had a
great run.”
That run is over now, or at least delayed, and Cabrera’s reputation will
never be the same. Rodriguez said Cabrera was probably “sad and
confused” now, but the confusion part is hard to believe. Just ask
Cabrera’s victim at the All-Star Game.
“Everybody tries to have an edge, but that edge should be doing it the
right way,” Harrison said. “Unfortunately, he wasn’t. I just don’t
understand why you would take that chance when you know you’re going to
get caught. I just don’t understand that.
“I guess it’s all good and everything, until you get caught.”
No comments:
Post a Comment