Final Project Rough Draft (but not really)

Disclaimer: I'm only using about 60-70% of this draft for the workshop. I will be posting a new rough draft by Wednesday, so kind of disregard this one.

Draft #1:

During the long and hazy summer months of my childhood, probably when I was about five or six, I remember spending countless hours in the backyard hitting baseballs off of a tee. Ball after ball, I’d try to out-do my previous long drive. In the backyard I’d stay, until my mother summoned me for dinner. Reluctantly, I’d tread back to the house, pants stained green, hands tainted brown, but not before I got that one last satisfactory hit – that pretend-you-are-in-the-world-series-walk-off-homerun hit. I was consumed.

If I were lucky, after supper my dad would come out and pitch to me; it was the highlight of any given day. It was during these live pitching sessions with my dad, during these formative years, that I learned the fundamentals of competition and the importance of success. “Swing for the fences” my dad would say.

It was a phrase that many kids playing in the age of tee-ball stardom heard over and over again and came to own as their personal manifests. Swinging for the fences - hitting homeruns – in our minds, was the sacred embodiment of the ultimate athletic achievement; it was the tangible measurement of your worth and place within our society’s little culture of competition.

The phrase not only became applicable to various facets of our lives but synonymous with similar phrases invoking the attainment of material success through competition, struggle, and hard work. If you weren’t swinging for the fences, you were shooting for the stars, and if you weren’t doing that you were breaking a leg, but you were always striving to achieve something. Thinking back, these idioms were our introduction to capitalism – like Sesame Street capitalism, or something of the sort.

I use to imagine one of my favorite baseballs players, Alex Rodriguez, growing up being told by his father to swing for the fences. I imagined this incantation resonating in his mind right before parking one of his five hundred and fifty three homeruns in the upper-deck of some mythical palace of baseball.

When I was six, Rodriguez at the age of eighteen, played in his first major league game starting at shortstop for the Seattle Mariners at the hallowed grounds of Fenway Park. Since then, Rodriguez has assembled some of the most prolific offensive seasons in the history of the game combining for career totals of 1,605 runs scored, 2,404 hits, 1,606 RBIs, and 553 homeruns. He is the only player to hit 150 homeruns for three different teams – the Mariners, Rangers, and Yankees – and he is the youngest player to reach the elite 500-career homerun plateau.

After spending his first seven seasons with the Mariners, Rodriguez filed for free agency in 2000 and eventually signed with the Texas Rangers. At the time, it was the most expensive contract ever awarded to an athlete in sports history: a staggering ten-year deal worth $252 million. In his three seasons with the Rangers, playing in the favorable climate and hitter-friendly park of Arlington, Rodriguez posted some of his best power numbers: between 2001 and 2002 he hit the most homeruns ever by an American League right-handed batter in consecutive seasons (109).

At the end of the 2003 season, Rodriguez was traded to my favorite and hometown team, the New York Yankees. To me, it was a match made in the baseball heavens: one of the best players to ever play the game was now playing for the most storied and successful sports franchise in history. If I had deeply respected and admired Rodriguez’s talent before, I was now required by Yankee Fan Oath to idolize him along with the ranks of other Yankee greats like Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Mickey Mantle, and Roger Maris.

Alex Rodriguez’s greatness was only amplified in the aftermath of baseball’s steroid era. The past few years have seen some of the last two decade’s best players’ names surface with connections to performance enhancing drugs. Roger Clemens, Jose Canseco, Miguel Tejada, Jason Giambi, Kevin Brown, Gary Sheffield, and most importantly Barry Bonds, the new all-time homerun leader, are just a few to have been identified. Missing from these lists was Alex Rodriguez, the apparent heir to the career homerun title, who was consequently tapped as the new bastion of hope to bring back the most sacred of records into the hands of a “pure player”.

Unfortunately, to the dismay of many, Rodriguez was recently discovered to have used steroids. Unlike other players before him, Rodriguez came out to the public and admitted his usage. However, this new development left the legions of his fans and baseball fans in general, in disbelief and understandable outrage. The hope of finding a clean, great player from the steroids era was lost.

Why would one of the greatest, naturally talented players have resorted to cheating? Why was his raw ability that allowed him to enter the major leagues fresh out of high school not enough?
Maybe, it was a personal thing, like wanting to inflate his career statistics to a level unreachable by the next generation of players. Perhaps this was one of the reasons, but I’m guessing it was the nature of American society that pushed him and all the others to cheating. The last twenty years have seen not only baseball, but also all sports contracts rise at unprecedented rates. The average MLB salary in 2005 was $2,632,655; compared to the average salary in 1985, which was $371,571, this represents a long cry from today’s standards.

Not coincidentally, this period of twenty years are usually considered the beginning and ending of the steroid era, an era in which records were shattered and re-shattered at rates never seen before in the previous hundred years of the game. It is arguable that this highly competitive and highly compensated era of baseball forced many players to take extreme measures. It perverted a healthy culture of competition into an anarchic free-for-all, in which team owners, federal regulators, and players themselves all turned a blind eye to the chronic problem of cheating in the name of competition.

But this phenomenon isn’t unique to just professional sports. No, capitalism in the digital age of globalization has pushed economic, physical, and mental standards to levels, that for the most part, are unattainable without artificial enhancement, breaking the law, cheating, or in some cases, all three.

Shareholders’ demands for out-of-this-world profits have led CEO’s, particularly on Wall Street, to implement risky business philosophies, sometimes out-right illegal, that have paved the way for a grave economic recession. College students, neglecting moral issues and concerns for their well-being, abuse highly controversial cognitive enhancing medications just to get that desired GPA.

It is obvious that society’s standards have exceeded the capacities of its members to meet them. Somewhere down the line, the ends became so important that people forgot about the means, allowing for all sorts of questionable methods to be employed.

Whereas I was consumed in my love for the game, maybe others were consumed too much with the singular goal of “swinging for the fences” and “shooting for the stars”. Maybe in the ad nauseam repetition of these phrases, people like Alex Rodriguez, and society in general, forgot that if you swing too hard you might just throw out your back.