Well, now we know why the Mets didn't re-sign Paul LoDuca

Just a few days ago, Mr. Brilliant and I were talking about what possible logic there could be in refusing to resign a sparkplug of a catcher who even in a slump year hit .272 and instead essentially trading Lastings Milledge for a .232-hitting catcher?

I guess now we know....which brings up the question: Did the Mets know?

I'm sure I wasn't the only one who looked at the roster of the all-steroid baseball team yesterday hoping to not to find too many Mets players. It's sort of like the time Reagan was shot and all I could think of was "Please don't let the guy who shot him be Jewish." For that matter, I'm sure every baseball fan approached the list hoping that his/her team wasn't too terribly tainted. That Lenny Dykstra was on steroids was no secret to anyone; between his pumped-up physique after the 1986 season and his myriad injuries late in his career, it was impossible to ignore. That Roger Clemens was still throwing hard well into his 40's, combined with his size, made him not a surprise either. Neither was the preponderance of Yankees on the list, given the organization's "Win at any price" philosophy.

What WAS a surprise was how many third-tier players there were on the list -- guys like Chris Donnells and Josias Manzanillo, whose careers were nasty, brutish, and short. We forget how many aspiring ball players scrape by on minor-league pay hoping against hope that they'll get to the big leagues. Even if their careers are short, an inexpensive by today's standards $5 million, three year deal can give a guy with few other options a chance at a relatively decent post-baseball life, if he's smart about his money during that short career. Without that edge that steroids gave them, guys like this were the baseball equivalent of Lana Clarkson, the still-aspiring actress whose time was running out at age 40 and ended up dead in Phil Spector's house -- just so much offal spat out of the giant sports-o-tainment maw.

I can't even say I have a problem with George Mitchell's judgment that it accomplishes nothing to administer retroactive punishment to these guys, especially when there was no banned substance policy in place when steroids were rampant in baseball and the choice was do what everyone else was doing or find yourself back in Springfield, USA delivering beer or working at Wal-Mart. And even for those star players, a disproportionate number of them passing through the Yankees organization, how can you hold it against them that they did what their employer expected them to do? When your organization wants a World Series win every year, and the back page of the Daily News and the Post; and the callers into the Mike and the Mad Dog show, like Vinnie from Queens and Jerome, will treat your failures as if they are somehow the end of the world?

What these guys did was the baseball equivalent of the 80-hour week -- whatever had to be done to get out a "quality product". The owners wanted the press. The fans wanted big, towering home runs. The players wanted to stay in the show. Everyone got what he wanted. So where's the problem?

The problem, of course, is that we still romanticize this game. The problem is that the Annie Savoy character in Bull Durham was right; that there IS a kind of poetry to baseball. It's the sport that best defines not "America" (that's football), but "Americana" -- that Charles Wysocki vision of what we want to think America is. It's what James Earl Jones as Terrence Mann says in Field of Dreams:

"The one constant through all the years has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It's been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt, and erased again. But baseball has marked the time. This field, this game, is a part of our past. It reminds us of all that once was good, and what could be again."

Just as we want to believe that our leaders can't possibly be as evil as George Bush and Dick Cheney appear to be because gosh darn it, we're America and we don't DO that sort of thing; we want to believe that our baseball players are pure, and that the sweet swing, the 95-mph fastball, the no-hitter, the 450-foot home run to win the game in the bottom of the ninth, are a result of that karmic magic that's baseball, not from an injection into the buttock before the game. It's the constant. It's what links us back to our fathers and grandfathers and a rural heritage many of us don't even have.

But just because we want to believe it doesn't make it true. And just as we must now face a world with the inescapable knowledge that we have allowed fear to control us to the extent that we are willing to tolerate torture practices for which we could condemn anyone else, we must now face a world where "sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, and sometimes it rains." Because that's the way the universe works. America isn't always right. And baseball players aren't always heroes.

Deal with it. And learn how to appreciate the bunt single.