Strike Out Baseball's Conformity Cops

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The Japanese have a saying: The nail that sticks up gets pounded down. John Rocker was a nail sticking up, and he got hammered for it. In a few days, the players' union will argue Rocker's appeal before a mediator named Shaym Das, claiming that the $20,000 fine, the suspension from baseball until May 1 and the mandatory "sensitivity training" amount to an excessive penalty for the pitcher's eruption of offensive free speech.

It's worth going over the case — "interrogating" it, as they say — to see what the controversy tells us.

Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig said Rocker's tantrum in Sports Illustrated (a magazine owned by Time Warner, which also owns TIME.com and the Atlanta Braves, the team for which Rocker plays) offended "practically every element of society." Hmmm. It's a little hard to believe that every element of American society was shaken when it heard a slightly weird baseball player deliver a monologue that might issue from the neighboring barstool in any urban Blarney Stone or rural Dew Drop Inn anywhere in America after the hour of 9:30 p.m., or the eighth beer, whichever comes first.

Anyway, Rocker has apologized. In fact, he had a targeting problem with his rant. He was aiming at New York City, not at the nation's minorities. Those offended "elements" were, so to speak, collateral damage. Rocker meant to direct his rage at a city about which practically everyone in America west of the Hudson shares Rocker's view. Specifically, Rocker meant to fire off a few bursts at New York baseball "fans."

There is no more deserving target. Anyone who knows New York baseball fans, especially Yankee fans, knows they include some of the most loathsome characters on earth. When is Selig going to suspend themfrom baseball? I stopped going to Yankee games years ago because invariably, toward the end of the sixth inning, the morons in the upper deck would be drunk again, and dumping beer on those below, and spewing a violent, concussive line of filth (directed at players on the field — especially if they belonged to the Boston Red Sox — or at their neighbors in the stands). That is the way they root, root, root for the home team out in the Bronx. During the World Series, these animals threw flashlight batteries at John Rocker on the field.

Searching for retaliatory ammunition, Rocker stupidly seized upon any caricature lying around the somewhat squalid surface of his mind. Rage is brainless and usually inarticulate. Unfortunately, Rocker got just articulate enough to snarl at gays with AIDS, and unwed mothers, and immigrants. That's the way a rant works. It needs vivid specificity.

Long ago, in another country, there was a noble American clich: I don't agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it. No intelligent person would defend what Rocker said. But every intelligent person should defend the principle that Rocker can say what he damn well wants. First you censure people for what they say, then you censure them for what they think or feel. Eventually they pre-edit what they say and think and even feel. Then we all live harmoniously, under the rule of a coercive pietism.

Pop historians denigrate the '50s as disgustingly "conformist." It's much worse now.

Which is the greater danger? 1) John Rocker's dumb opinions, or 2) the sinister cultural drift suggested by the sanctimonious fuss that Rocker's tantrum triggered? Kids in America have handguns, drugs and pornography lying around their lives within easy reach, and what sets off our moral indignation? John Rocker and the "bad example he sets" for America's youth. Right. And for that we send him off to sensitivity training.