LITMIR.BIZ

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the first five weeks of the 2000 season, teams played 457 games, during which they averaged nearly 11 runs a game and 2.59 home runs. In the first 457 games of the 1992 season, by contrast, teams managed just 8.39 runs and 1.45 homers per game. In eight brief years, total scoring has risen by 28 percent and long-distance connections are up by a whopping 79 percent. And we’re not even into warm weather, when hitters really get cooking.

      Some of the reasons for the offensive surge are obvious, and some are in dispute. Hitters claim they are just bigger, stronger and better than hitters of old, thanks to advanced nutrition and hundreds of off-season hours spent lifting weights, instead of fishing or selling insurance as their forebears did.

      There is something to this argument: Joe DiMaggio, who won two home run titles, was a willowy 6 feet 2 inches and 193 pounds, which these days is a good size for a patent lawyer. Mark McGwire goes 6 feet 5 inches and 250 and is large enough to moonlight in rodeo bull-riding — as the bull.

      Expansion has made life easier for McGwire and other hitters by letting them face undertalented pitchers who otherwise would be riding buses in the minors. In the struggle to fill pitching staffs, major league teams have become about as selective as a 1st-grade talent show. Baltimore currently has four pitchers with an earned run average of 9.00 or more. Toronto has three with ERAs above 11. In the old days, an ERA of 9.00 would get you a job driving a truck.

      New fields have also been kind to hitters. The cavernous Houston Astrodome, where home runs went to die, has been replaced with Enron Field, which measures just 315 feet down the right field foul line and 326 feet in left — reasonable dimensions for a high school stadium.

      Hitting a baseball 315 feet used to be good for a single, if you were lucky. Letting a team put the fences that close makes about as much sense as letting a team put the pitcher’s rubber 55 feet from the plate.

      And let’s not even talk about Colorado’s Coors Field, where thin, dry air and weak gravity combine to turn pop-ups into homers and pitchers into quivering wrecks. During the 1998 All-Star game there, the best moundsmen in the National League wore themselves out throwing 214 pitches and giving up 13 runs.

      But pitchers insist that much of the problem lies with a turbo-charged ball, and no one this side of Bud Selig doubts it. Even Atlanta’s peerless Greg Maddux says the current ball is so hard it should have a Titleist stamp on it.

      If the offensive boom is due to good hitters and weak pitchers, why did 71 players strike out 100 times or more last season? After 35 games this year, Sammy Sosa has as many strikeouts as Joe DiMaggio ever had in an entire season.

      What can be done? The ball can have a little of the juice taken out, fences can be placed farther from home plate, the strike zone can be expanded beyond postage-stamp size, and batters can be barred from wearing all that plastic armor on their forearms and elbows, which makes them impervious to inside pitches. It also wouldn’t hurt to eliminate a few teams in smaller markets, thus freeing a lot of guys to pitch in Sunday morning softball leagues.

      Nobody wants to return to 1915, when Braggo Roth won the American League home-run title with 7. But something needs to be done to rescue a game that should be more than longball. Arena football isn’t true football, and baseball fans may eventually conclude that this new version of their game should be outta here.

The Great Emancipator

       Or was Abraham Lincoln actually a white oppressor?

       Sunday, May 14, 2000

      Millions of admiring words have been written about Abraham Lincoln, but not one of them was composed by Lerone Bennett Jr. Bennett is executive editor of Ebony magazine and author of an incendiary new book, “Forced Into Glory: Abraham Lincoln’s White Dream,” which depicts the 16th president as an oppressor, a supporter of slavery and the relentless enemy of black equality. Racism, says Bennett, was “the center and circumference of his being.” Next to Bennett’s version of Lincoln, David Duke looks good.

      Despite its provocative thesis, the book has been a well-kept secret, most likely because it comes from the obscure Johnson Publishing Co. Time magazine columnist Jack E. White complains that “Forced Into Glory” is “not getting the kind of attention non-fiction works by white authors have received.” To address our racial issues, he says, we need “to stop ignoring Bennett’s discomfiting book.”

      The book is useful because every generation ought to re-examine the received assumptions of our political culture. Bennett’s portrayal will surprise both whites and blacks raised to revere the Great Emancipator. But this massive exercise in demonization fails because it misunderstands both Lincoln and his era.

      At a superficial level, Lincoln harbored many of the racial prejudices of the time. He grew up in a society where black inferiority was assumed, and he was given to racial jokes and even use of the “N” word. Before becoming president, he said he didn’t favor racial equality. As president, he insisted that “if I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it.”

      But Lincoln’s racial attitudes evolved as he grew older — to the point that Frederick Douglass said he was “the first great man that I talked with in the United States freely, who in no single instance reminded me of the difference between himself and myself, of the difference of color.”

      Bennett accuses Lincoln of caring nothing about the plight of blacks, but the truth is that Lincoln took the position throughout his career that slavery was a “monstrous injustice.” The important thing is not that Lincoln was free of racial prejudice, but that he could rise above it to oppose slavery and work toward its extinction.

      Part of the fraud Bennett ascribes to Lincoln is the Emancipation Proclamation, which he says did not free any slaves. It’s hardly news that the decree applied only to areas under rebel control — where Lincoln’s writ did not run. But it did make clear to everyone, North and South, that the war was henceforth a war not only to save the Union but to end slavery.

      It was cheered by abolitionists despite its limitations, while being bitterly denounced by pro-slavery leaders, who saw it as an invitation to slave revolt. Lincoln didn’t stop with this: He pushed for a constitutional amendment to abolish the institution everywhere, which he lacked the legal authority to do by himself.

      If Lincoln had pushed harder and earlier for abolition, he might have satisfied Bennett. But, says Princeton historian James McPherson, he would have shattered support for the war, with the result that “the Confederacy would have established its independence, and with 14 states instead of 11.” And slavery would have survived.

      His proposal to resettle blacks abroad is reviled by Bennett as “the ethnic cleansing of America.” Lincoln did support the idea, not because he hated blacks but because he knew the depths of racism among whites. If blacks couldn’t gain equality here, he reasoned, might they not be better off in a homeland of their own? And wouldn’t that prospect defuse white support for slavery? Lincoln eventually abandoned this option, though, and set about trying to create a society where blacks could live in freedom.

      He pursued his goals with a political skill and cunning that often confused his friends as well as his enemies. But pursue them he did, without cease. Said Frederick Douglass, himself a former slave, “Viewed from the genuine abolition ground, Mr. Lincoln seemed tardy, cold, dull and indifferent; but measuring him by the sentiment of his country, a sentiment he was bound as a statesman to consult, he was swift, zealous, radical and determined.”

      Lincoln didn’t have to embark on a war to put down the rebellion of the slave states, but he did. He didn’t have to accept the deaths of 360,000 Union soldiers in the effort, but he did. He could have made peace with the rebels and left the slaves to their fate in a Confederate States of America, but he refused.

      Instead, Lincoln never veered from a painful, costly and bitter course aimed at both preserving the republic and ridding it of slavery. And in the end, he succeeded, to the everlasting benefit of both races. If those achievements were the work of an enemy, black Americans would not need friends.

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