Fans show their true colors

This week was the first in the long Major League Baseball season. Last year ended on a high for MLB as the long-cursed Boston Red Sox won the championship for the first time in 86 years.

But that goodwill was quickly tainted by a controversy about allegedly rampant steroid use among players. There were grandstanding hearings before the US Senate. MLB adopted a sham non-policy toward steroids. It takes a player getting caught using steroids five times to even get a one-year suspension. New York Yankees' star Jason Giambi admitted to a federal grand jury that he'd used steroids.

This admission and suspicions that other stars did the same provoked much hand-wringing amongst fans and sportswriters. "How can the integrity of the game be preserved?" fumed some. "Cheaters should all be kicked out of the game," roared others. One magazine asked melodramatically how this would affect the sanctity of baseball's cherished records and what are we going to tell our kids?

Here's what you tell your kids. Athletes who use steroids are cheaters. And that cheating is wrong. You also tell them about the other ways people cheat and how those are wrong too. People who "embellish" their resumes are cheaters. Professors who sign their names to books essentially written by graduate assistants are cheaters. Students who "borrow" papers off the Internet are cheaters.

We like to say cheaters never win, but the unfortunate reality is that quite often they do. At least in the short term. It's one of the aggravating parts of about trying to be ethical.

Anyways, MLB was surely relieved that the season started so the focus could return to the field. The season started with a reprise of the rivalry between the Red Sox and the New York Yankees, the most passionate in North American sports. That rivalry is one of the few things in sports that lives up to the massive, overdone hype.

Yankees pitcher Mariano Rivera blew save opportunities in back-to-back games against the Red Sox. I believe it was the first time in his career that Rivera blew save opportunities in consecutive regular season games, He was an integral part of Yankee teams that won championships in 1998, 1999 and 2000 and were runners up in 2001 and 2003 and is still probably the best closer in the game. Rivera is also widely acknowledged to be one of the classiest individuals on the team.

So of course, New Yorkers heartily booed the Rivera as he left the field on Wednesday. I'm a Red Sox fan and thus can't stand the Yankees, but I agree with Yankee manager Joe Torre (another class act who demonstrates that nice guys don't always finish last). "I think it's inexcusable if they were boos from Yankee fans," said Torre, who's won four championships in nine years with the club. "They wouldn't be champing at the bit to get to this ballpark if it weren't for him."

And just as naturally, Yankee fans gave the admitted cheat Giambi a standing ovation as he went up for his first at-bat.

For all the melodramatic chest-puffing about fairness and ethics, at the end of the day, most fans don't really give a damn if players cheat so long as it's clandestine and, most importantly, so long as they win. While classy people like Rivera, who play by the rules but are occassionally shown to be human in their abilities, get booed off the field.

But I suppose none of this should surprise you.