Baseball

Lo Duca’s gambling is issue, not infidelity

Sins of the flesh is small problem compared to betting on sports

Nick Laham / Getty Images file

Gambling allegations, adultery claims, a former Playboy model wife and misspelled e-mails from a 19-year-old woman have made a perfect tabloid recipe to rip open All-Star catcher Paul Lo Duca's personal life during his first season in New York.

If he had been nailed for DWI, there would be a flurry of criticism and pious thundering from the usual quarters, but he’d be playing ball the next day with no threat of suspension. It would be the same if he were accused of domestic abuse or cheating on his taxes, which isn’t a victimless crime, since when you steal from the government, you steal from every honest taxpayer.

I’m not saying that athletes aren’t allowed to make the same dumb mistakes everybody else does. But we keep saying that athletes should be held to higher standards because of the special place they occupy in society. But the game doesn’t look at it that way. Like all sports, baseball has a very ambivalent — and, one could argue, hypocritical — attitude towards foibles of the flesh as exhibited by the subspecies jockus americanus.

Commissioner Bud Selig makes decisions the same way politicians do. He checks to see which way the winds of public opinion are blowing and sets his course accordingly. The difference is that instead of angling for votes, Selig is fishing for paying customers.

So, when the customers poured through the turnstiles to watch men with abnormally monstrous muscles hit home runs left the park chased by contrails of steroids, Selig did the happy dance. Not until the fans started to complain when word got out that perhaps performance-enhancing drugs had something to do with the game’s power party did Selig do anything to address the game’s drug problem. And even then he did it only when browbeaten into it by Congress.

The result is that the acts that can get you nailed by the game are the ones that most aggravate the paying customers. One of those is betting on games, which was the first sin banned by baseball more than 80 years ago in response to the Black Sox scandal, in which the Chicago White Sox conspired to throw the 1919 World Series to the Cincinnati Reds. The other is drugs.

Long before baseball banned performance-enhancing drugs, it banned the recreational variety. If Darryl Strawberry, Dwight Gooden and Steve Howe had been gobbling ’roids back in the mid-1980s, they’d have been just fine with the game. Instead, they went with cocaine and were hit with multiple suspensions. (They should have gotten hooked on oxycontin — no suspensions for that.)

It’s not about what’s right for the game, but what’s right for public relations. Some day, the public may get outraged enough about excessive and illegal gambling to demand that the commissioner to something about it. In the meantime, we have Paul Lo Duca, specializing in risky behavior and choosing his friends unwisely. He’s not harming the game — not directly, anyway. But he’s sure not doing it — or himself — any good.

Mike Celizic writes regularly for MSNBC.com and is a freelance writer based in New York.

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