The 30 Greatest Sports Conspiracy Theories of All-Time - Elliott Kalb [113]
Speaking of Bonds (and the aforementioned Sosa), some have argued that shining the spotlight on a guy like Ripken, who had become symbol for all that was good and pure in baseball, may have been an attempt by Major League Baseball to direct fan (and media) attention away from how cartoonishly large its players were getting using performance-enhancing drugs. After all, this was 2001, the year three National Leaguers—Bonds, Sosa, and Arizona’s Luis Gonzalez—combined to slug 194 round-trippers. Gonzalez, a slight 6’2”, 180 lb. outfielder, had averaged just 16.4 home runs per season over the previous ten campaigns. Surprisingly, only one of Gonzalez’s fifty-seven home runs in 2001 was surrendered by Park.
EVIDENCE AGAINST A CONSPIRACY
The strongest evidence against this conspiracy is the nature of baseball. It is often said that hitting a round ball with a round bat is the hardest thing to do in all of sports. Even if that’s a debatable point, one thing that isn’t debatable is that Ripken still had to connect and hit the home run even if Park did groove one for him.
Asked by the San Francisco Chronicle’s John Shea about the possibility of Park teeing one up, catcher Mike Piazza, who called the pitch Ripken knocked out of the park, expressed his doubt. “It was a strike,” Piazza said. “Major-league hitters hit strikes. Even if you groove one, there’s still a chance the batter’s not going to hit it out. He could pop it up, roll it over. I read some pretty amazing things that people conjured up.”
Commenting on the likelihood of the conspiracy in a column for ESPN.com’s Page 2, Jim Caple wrote, “Bud Selig being capable of orchestrating anything more involved than the Beer Barrel Polka? Please.” Ironically, this column came a year before Selig’s awful and much-criticized decision to declare the 2002 All-Star Game, contested in his home park in Milwaukee, an eleven-inning tie after both teams had run out of available relief pitchers. In a later column, Caple wrote that the conspiracy theory surrounding Ripken’s feat was “hokey,” adding, that the homer “was just Cal, rising to the occasion as usual. Just as when he homered in the game he tied Lou Gehrig’s playing streak. Just as he homered the next night when he broke Gehrig’s record. Just as he so often did during his twenty-year career.”
MY OPINION
While there is little evidence to support the accusation that Commissioner Selig himself instructed Park to groove one to Ripken, it bears mentioning that Bobby Valentine, the National League’s manager who once snuck back into the Mets dugout donning a fake moustache after being ejected, was not above resorting to dramatic shenanigans. Still, considering how Valentine and Ripken had no professional connection to each other, it seems unlikely that he would have ordered Park to put one on a platter for him.
I’m inclined to agree with Piazza on this one. Even if Park did groove the pitch, too many different things could have happened. Ripken could have fouled it off. He could have hit a line drive right at someone. He could have simply hit a sharp ground ball up the middle. And if any of those things had happened, we wouldn’t be talking about a conspiracy today.
Park, himself, has never acknowledged that he had grooved the pitch. “It was an amazing moment,” he said in the post-game press conference, presumably through a translator. “The first pitch I ever threw in an All-Star Game was the last home run for Mr. Ripken. It’s a big gift for him. It made him MVP, that’s pretty good.”
An interesting choice of words, sure, but this conspiracy theory just doesn’t hold up to scrutiny.