Everett, Wash.
Published: Monday, May 11, 2009

In both baseball and business, shortcuts have consequences

 I've never been a big fan of using sports as a metaphor for life, but I think there's a lesson to be learned in last week's news that Dodgers slugger Manny Ramirez may have taken illegal performance-enhancing drugs.

One of the most popular and prolific players in the game will sit out 50 games because he violated Major League Baseball's drug policy. He leaves at a time when New York Yankees star Alex Rodriguez, who left the Mariners for the really big money, is returning to his team.

Rodriguez wasn't suspended, but he has acknowledged using ­performance-enhancing drugs in the past for at least a couple of years.

Ramirez's suspension "breaks my heart," USA Today quoted former Dodgers manager Tommy Lasorda as saying.

A colleague who loves the Red Sox was quick to say that she hoped Ramirez got on the juice after leaving the Sox. If word comes out that he started before his move to Los Angeles, I'm sure her heart will be broken, too.

People in all walks of life use illegal drugs for a variety of reasons. It's heartbreaking. Is that the metaphor? Of course not.

What we have in Ramirez and Rodriguez are two superb athletes, people who were acknowledged as superior athletes before the steroid allegations, who wanted to be better. They wanted to be better than everybody else and they wanted to do it faster -- let's say easier -- than anybody else.

They allegedly took banned substances for more money and more fame, and they sullied our national pastime. Manny and Pay-Rod are just the latest of a growing line of star athletes who for whatever reason felt compelled to take the wrong road.

There are so many parallels here with the nation's economic situation that I don't know where to begin.

I guess we could cut to the heart of things that put the nation's and the world's economy on the brink. People made so much money on selling homes to people who couldn't afford them that they kept doing it even though they knew it was wrong.

Don't make enough money? Just lie to us and we'll give you a loan anyway. We won't actually check your income.

No down payment?

We have a loan for that.

Payments too high?

Hey, just pay us some interest for now, we'll charge you more later.

It wasn't until the house of cards built by some of the banks started tumbling down that we heard the stories about "liar loans" and how nobody seemed to care as long as the money kept coming in.

Our economy, if you will, was on the juice.

Faster and easier became the mantra of our financial system. And we all see how that worked out.

If there's a lesson to be learned in the mortgage mess -- and the Manny mess -- it's that nothing comes faster and easier forever. Eventually there's a piper to be paid. We're all paying him now for our economic extremes.

Manny, and, to a degree, all of us baseball fans are paying for the extreme demands that society places on our athletes. We have to pay to clean up the game.

Bigger. Better. Faster.

Sounds good now, but it's dangerous in the long run to take too many shortcuts, whether in baseball or in our business lives.



Mike Benbow: 425-339-3459; benbow@heraldnet.com.
© 2009The Daily Herald Co., Everett, WA