Patriot at the Bat

Just as Roger Clemens can be counted on to fire heat, our national pastime inevitably waves the flag in times of national stress. After 9/11, Bud Selig, the commissioner of Major League Baseball, decided that the traditional pregame singing of "The Star-Spangled Banner" did not reflect sufficient patriotic fervor and decreed that "God Bless America" also be sung at each game. At the outset, almost all teams complied, usually during the seventh-inning stretch, with players due to bat giving voice while standing on the dugout steps.

For many months now, Carlos Delgado, the star first baseman of the Toronto Blue Jays, has protested the US invasion of Iraq by quietly refusing to appear in chorus with his teammates. "I think it's the stupidest war ever," he told the Toronto Star not long ago. "Who are you fighting against? You're just getting ambushed now. We have more people dead now after the war [was officially declared over], than during the war. You've been looking for weapons of mass destruction. Where are they at? Can't find them.... It's just stupid."

Delgado's antiwar anger is rooted in his native Puerto Rico, where for six decades the US Navy tested myriad weapons by bombing the small island of Vieques off the country's eastern coast. Large portions of the island are now off-limits because of unexploded shells, and the bombing's widespread contamination is suspected of causing abnormally high cancer rates among the local population. In 1999 an errant bomb killed a civilian on Vieques, and Delgado, then in his sixth year as a Blue Jay, got involved, along with many other outraged Puerto Ricans. He has since donated some $100,000 to communities and activists on Vieques and, in April 2001, together with singer Ricky Martin and boxer Felix Trinidad, took out full-page ads in the New York Times and the Washington Post protesting the bombing. "Sometimes you've just got to break the mold," Delgado says. "You've got to push it a little bit or else you can't get anything done." In May of last year, the Navy finally ended its sixty-year bombing run.

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