Introduction: Last Days Before Spring Training

Jason Giambi. At his Yankee press conference in the winter of 2001, clean cut and without goatee, he came close to crying when invoking Mickey Mantle. The namedropping was probably not accidental: Giambi was positioning himself to take a seat alongside the icons of Monument Park, and it did not seem presumptuous. He was going to be great.

Tino, despite all the recent World Series heroics, had been thrown out of paradise, shoved aside to make way for the new guy. I remember my dad, a Yankee fan since he was born in the summer of ’49, asking me, “Is this Giambi worth the money? Can he play in New York? Is he really going to be better than Tino?” I laughed at him. “He’s going to be great,” I said. “No doubt.”

This was a foolish thing to say: there is always room for doubt. Jason Giambi, though he has given us a few heroic moments, has found his narrative defined by something other than success. By becoming the face of baseball’s steroid era, Giambi has brought himself, and the American public, into uncharted territory. Going into the 2005 season, the question hangs there—what to do about Jason Giambi? It is obvious enough how opposing fans will greet Giambi all season, but how will home fans—and teammates—express their ambivalence about this fallen hero who is attempting to resurrect his career, reputation, life? Heroes are easy, as are villains. But which is Giambi? My answer, and the reason I am writing this blog, is neither. Jason is something more interesting: human. Immensely talented, a good-spirited team player, deeply flawed. He cheated. He contributed to the staining of the game, and may never have his life back as a result.

But that is all in the past. What is interesting to me is not what Giambi did. The specifics of the steroid years may never be known, as Giambi’s weirdly convoluted February press conference made clear. That sort of investigation is for other, more talented reporters than me, anyway.

The future interests me. The unfolding narrative of the 2005 season, of Giambi trying to find a life for himself after his fall from grace; that is the complex stuff of human drama that makes a writer salivate. I want to chronicle Jason Giambi’s season as he struggles to emerge from a place no other player has been. Sure, Bonds and McGwire and Sheffield and half the league have seen their names stained, but Giambi is the one unlucky bastard about whom people can say, without any doubt, that he used steroids.

America loves simplified heroes, and the baseball iconography has provided plenty. Jason Giambi tried to make himself one, but his humanity got in the way. But what if we were to stop romanticizing the game? What if we probed it for complexity and reality? Wouldn’t we find it even more meaningful and interesting than it has been in the past? Maybe the steroid era, rather than making us cynical, can actually end up deepening our love for the game, by forcing us to finally see it for all its ugly, beautiful, complicated but real self?

We shall see.