Biogenesis, Betting, and Bans

I may not be the biggest A-Rod fan. Or Yankees fan. But I’m a huge fan of fair treatment. 

When reports surfaced yesterday that MLB was considering a lifetime ban from the game for Alex Rodriguez, I began searching for a list of people who have been banned for life and the reasons why. It’s not a long list, but it’s long enough that I’m only going to examine one very famous and controversial ban.

The Catcher in the “Why”: Ray Fosse’s America

Throughout our lives we make conscious decisions designed to construct a level of predictability or controlled outcome from those decisions. We may decide to buy a new car in order to get to a certain location faster or we may decide to change jobs because of the benefits that employment has for us. But ultimately one has to accept that with each breath of life we take there is a level of control we must sacrifice to surrender to the notion that events which transpire in the time frame of a few seconds or in the direction of a few inches can change one’s life forever. Someone with limitless physical potential can in one second become a shell of the man he or she was and what could be a friendly exhibition of talent and skill one moment can just as quickly turn into an unnecessarily violent war the next. For a 23 year old, Raymond Earl Fosse, the cruelty of bad timing and coincidence essentially wiped away the promise of a baseball career while the seeds of a career in broadcasting were unknowingly planted. All within the blink of an eye.