DOWN WITH THE DOGS!

By Laura Onstot, l-onstot@northwestern.edu

Executives of worldwide corporations are like baseball players. We root for their stock prices and earned run averages, we take what they sell us, no questions asked, and we fervently believe they will never let us down.

We are suckers.

But the march of our disillusionment is well under way.

Yesterday, a jury of their peers convicted Enron executives Kenneth Lay and Jeffrey Skilling of fraud, insider trading, lying through their teeth and screwing their employees (as they say in the legal world.)

I wasn’t surprised. It takes a certain kind of person to make it to the top in the corporate world. You must be talented, motivated, have great training, and above all, be cold and ruthless. The faint-of-heart need not apply for positions in big business.

And when you’ve built a career by stepping on toes, stabbing friends in the back, and climbing that ladder with single-minded determination, can we really expect you to stop at the call of ethics? Probably not.

There are few similarities between Sosa and the Enron execs. Lay and Skilling have been privy to the benefits of high-priced educations and wear suits. Sosa used an interpreter during the senate hearings on steroid use and wears funny little pants.

But there are more similarities than differences. Like the Enron guys, Sosa denied any wrong doing when other men in suits asked questions. Unlike the Enron guys, Sosa won’t likely go to trial, but if he did, it’s easy to imagine the jury not believing him. Just like they didn’t believe those liars at Enron.

In 1990, I was a fourth-grader in jelly shoes and Sosa was a rookie in south Chicago. Few remember the days when the former Cubbie hitting phenomenon played for the White Sox, but I do. I saw the Mariners lose to the Sox in the Kingdome that year. My sense of defeat that night was lifted temporarily when someone dropped a whole box of new baseball cards. I picked up a few for my collection. I placed the card in the holographic pink binder, in alphabetical order to satisfy my type-A personality, then forgot all about it.

A few years ago, I was watching Sosa bat for the Cubs against the White Sox at Wrigley. It was a game to remember for several reasons (games in the standing room section always are) but half-way through, the card, preserved in the pink binder, came to mind.

I looked at the man swinging a bat, looking like a toothpick in his massive arms, and realized why it took me five innings to remember that card. In 1990, he was a good player, but much thinner, trim, athletic even. As I looked at the hulking mass below me, I thought: “His head is HUGE!�

I’ve been a baseball fan all my life, but in that moment I realized something. I just take these guys for granted. I believe that they are the boys of summer, the heroes of America’s favorite pastime. I believe they won’t let me down. And I am a sucker for it.

Sosa may never be convicted by a jury, but like becoming the head of a major corporation, making the All-Star team repeatedly based on hitting statistics requires absolute determination. That kind of determination does not leave room for ethics, morality, or even good decision making. So when the team doctor tells you he can get you more homeruns this season, you don’t even stop to think, you just do.

All this has given me second thoughts about my love of baseball. But I’m not ready to give it up. Maybe the answer, like the answer to corruption in corporate America is not sports celibacy, but buying local. We can make ourselves less likely to be hurt by the Lays and Skillings of the world by supporting smaller enterprise where community-mindedness is part of the business plan.

Let the big companies and the big teams have their greed and corruption. I’m going back to the minors. Baseball never should have left Brooklyn so you know what? Screw you Enron, and the Cubs, and all the other greedy assholes that have let me down.

Go Cyclones!