Looking back on a career fraught with lunacy and the inspiration for one of the least sympathetic protagonists on television, it can be a trial to remember the good times with John Rocker. Often, it seems impossible that there were ever any good times at all.
Born in Statesboro, Georgia (where else?), Rocker excelled at First Presbyterian Day School in Macon. Rocker was impressive enough that the hometown Braves selected him in the 18th round as an 18-year-old starter in the 1993 amateur draft. Rocker was a starter for much of his minor league career but, despite high strikeout rates, found little success. Eventually, coaches realized Rocker was more effective in short bursts, and Rocker became a reliever. He debuted in the majors in 1998, throwing 38 high-caliber innings (he finished that year with a 2.13 ERA, 1.16 WHIP and 42 strikeouts). Incumbent closer Kerry Ligtenberg blew out his arm before the 1999 season, setting the stage for Rocker to take over the closer role.
The intensity with which Rocker approached baseball and life was evident from his first appearances. Sprinting madly from the bullpen to the mound, Rocker uncoiled movie-scene fastballs with bundled rage. Physically, he took to the closer role seamlessly, marrying the intimidation and velocity of the ideal closer. Performance-wise, Rocker was very good, with a 2.49 ERA and 1.16 WHIP, to go with 104 strikeouts in 72.1 innings. However, he blew seven saves, and his 4.6 walks per nine innings were disconcertingly high.
Nevertheless, Rocker saved 38 games and was a presence in the ninth, his mad dash to the mound, scored by Twisted Sister, quickly becoming a spectacle in and of itself. As a closer, Rocker became a rock star. A course toward larger-than-life bullpen superstardom appeared inevitable. The harnessed madman was testosterone in baseball form, charging, surging and annihilating in three-minute bursts.
More Ted Nugent than Dee Snider, Rocker went off the rails with his notorious Sports Illustrated interview in the winter of 2000. Racing down state route 400 (late for a speaking engagement) Rocker matter-of-factly spewed political incorrectness, racism and homophobia as sports journalist Jeff Pearlman assuredly struggled to hide his mix of personal disdain and professional excitement.
Rocker railed against anyone and everyone. He honked and screamed at other drivers, shouting “I guarantee you she’s a Japanese woman. How bad are Asian women at driving?” at a passing car (driven by a white woman, Pearlman notes). On New York, Rocker offered his most infamous opine, stating “Imagine having to take the [Number] 7 train to the ballpark, looking like you're [riding through] Beirut next to some kid with purple hair next to some queer with AIDS right next to some dude who just got out of jail for the fourth time right next to some 20-year-old mom with four kids. It's depressing.” Rocker stopped beating around the bush when discussing Times Square, acknowledging “The biggest thing I don't like about New York are the foreigners. I'm not a very big fan of foreigners.” Rocker’s uninhibited rage towards New York and multiculturalism was immediately a national story, drawing the first amendment, the lines of racism and the scales and limits of sports rivalries into public discourse.
Rocker had already become a villain in the Big Apple; in the previous year’s playoffs, he clashed with Mets fans in the bullpen.. Middle fingers, swears and a baseball hurled at protective netting were the highlights of the already volatile Rocker’s exchanges with Mets faithful. The Sports Illustrated comments reified what Mets fans already felt about the impetuous young gunner, and turned the rest of America against him.
What made Rocker’s vitriol so reviled wasn’t just the rhetoric itself, but the insinuated truth behind it. From his own mouth, Rocker released the most infuriating ignorant crutch: “’I'm not a racist or prejudiced person,’ he says with apparent conviction. ‘But certain people bother me[1].’" Rocker represented an outsized but very real population, and a nation still purportedly striving for unabashed equality had no choice but to soundly condemn a man espousing such a dangerous line of self-deception represented by a defiantly ignorant minority.
The Braves are the most truly “Southern” baseball team. With no Major League Baseball presence in Alabama, Mississippi, the Carolinas or Louisiana, the Braves’ reach extends far beyond the I-285 perimeter. Cursive ‘A’ caps adorn the bald or shaggy heads of many a good old boy throughout the Deep South; the region itself home to some of the last unabashed pockets of pure bigotry. Of course, ‘southern’ bigotry is an overrated epidemic - racism, sexism and homophobia are by no means close to dead in even the bluest regions of California – but the “tell it like it is” hate speech in Rocker’s tone is the last of pre-Civil War “honesty” so wholly believed by too many Deep South lifers.
The fear was not just that Rocker would go un-reprimanded; it was that Rocker’s statements could encourage others – indeed, Rocker quickly emerged as hate-speech’s “It Gets Better” poster child. Supporters blindly rallied behind the first amendment and seemed legitimately bewildered that a private company such as Major League Baseball could punish an employee for openly attacking other races and orientations. A concerned nation had to show it did not stand for prejudice, and while the Constitution rightly protected Rocker from the judicial system, Bud Selig could brandish the stick demanded in the court of public opinion. Rocker was suspended for spring training and the first 28 games of the 2000 season (later reduced to the first 14 games of ’00). Upon his return, Rocker was met with a chorus of Mets-esque boos in every away city.
When not lambasted, he was lampooned. John Rocker was memorably portrayed as a character on Saturday Night Live’s Weekend Update. Rocker was played by Will Ferrell, whose physical size and hit-or-miss hammery played perfectly as the hot-tempered closer. Ferrell’s character was met with giddy play-along boos as he proved incapable of delivering a “wish for the New Year” without peppering in a desire to “hunt down the black baby the Jews and the Pope had together” and scorning New Yorkers for watching the “queer Mets go down on the homosexual Yankees.” The segment ended with a borderline violent Ferrell/Rocker decrying various non-WASP groups while championing his “daddy” and blue-collar willful ignorance, a brilliant, hilarious and depressingly realism-rooted send-off of the pitcher and all loudmouthed Rocker prototypes. Rocker’s fragile psyche was already beginning to show, and the nonstop public flogging quite possibly broke him. He managed a steady 2.89 ERA (despite an ugly 1.70 WHIP) after his return in the 2000 season, but the distraction proved too much. Rocker had a 3.09 ERA and 1.28 WHIP after 32 innings, but by late June the Braves had been worn down by the circus and Rocker was shipped to the Cleveland Indians for two bullpen Steves; Karsay and Reed.
Rocker struggled in Cleveland, with a 5.45 ERA and 1.67 WHIP in 34.2 innings as the walks finally caught up to him. He was traded to the Texas Rangers in the offseason, where a fitting 6.66 ERA in 24.1 innings marked the unceremonious end of his big league career. Though he still had washouts in the Texas and Tampa Bay minor league systems ahead of him, Rocker had thrown his last major league pitch at age 27. A 2005 comeback with, of all teams, the Long Island Ducks, ended after 18 innings and Rocker was finally finished with baseball, long after baseball was finished with him.
Between comeback attempts, Rocker found time to star in The Greenskeeper, a 2002 horror/comedy in which he played a psychotic golf club groundskeeper. Channeling his rage-fueled mound face, Rocker dove headlong into the surreal project. When not on the field or behind the movie camera, Rocker still found time to stir up controversy, making insulting remarks to patrons at a LGBT-friendly Texas brunch restaurant he must have accidentally stumbled into. In addition, he consistently displayed blasé contrition for his previous comments, and was eventually linked to steroid usage, surprising no one. After his playing career ended, Rocker tried to remake himself as a conservative Republican talking head, launching a “Speak English” campaign and T-shirt line, joining hands with the woefully misguided legions of Americans too blinded to any notion of global politics to recognize the already world-wide proliferation of English as in any way contradictory to their obsession with forcing all American citizens to promptly master the English tongue.
Rocker long ago relinquished his rights to be remembered for his on-field exploits. He is less a baseball player than an idea at this point. But, briefly, Rocker was a damn fine ballplayer. At one time, a future of a Ligtenberg/Rocker bullpen gave Atlantans still reeling from Mark Wohler’s implosion faith in the bullpens of the future. His PR disaster was initially seen as forgivable; a blip in his career that a year of heckling and sensitivity training would rectify. It wasn’t until Rocker’s return to Shea Stadium that the scale of the situation truly hit. Rocker’s appearance was met with 700 security officers, up from the usual 60. Special fences were erected around the bullpen, alcohol sales were limited, and Rocker left the stadium 30 minutes after his teammates, with a black van with a security convoy. Though no attempts were made on Rocker’s life, the spectacle proved the immensity of the distraction Rocker had created.
Once his trade was imminent, Braves fans still struggled to reconcile the issue in their own moral codes. Rocker was a nutjob, but he was a nutjob in the most earnest possible way. This at once made him both more and less dangerous than your typical head case. His xenophobia made a future with Atlanta impossible while simultaneously making him the most emblematic Brave of all time. But his anger, initially endearing when it was just a sports spat with the hated Mets, swelled larger and larger in the post-SI era. Calling Randall Simon a “fat monkey[2]” and hating New York because of some “queer with AIDS” on the train were the rare off-color statements that became less and less forgivable as time went on. He had seemed salvageable; the small-town Baptist who went to college and had his eyes opened. Time proved otherwise, Rocker was moronic, not misguided.
Although he has readily lamented his own lack of intelligence, Rocker’s steadfast refusal to accept his intellectual limitations as an obstacle is troubling. His inability to differentiate his “political” beliefs from a traditional white pride persecution complex has thus far destroyed any chance he’s had at redemption. Rocker has embraced his position as the face of the ignorant south. Hiding behind Freedom of Speech and conservative politics, Rocker remains a despicable icon and a “celebrity” spokes-piece for divisive racial politics, planting himself firmly alongside Anglo-centric lobbyists with strong enough cognitive dissonance to convince themselves they are anything but the evolutionary form of the Ku Klux Klan
An issue that remains seldom discussed, at least in revisionist sports-talk, is the early demise of Rocker’s playing career. Attributed largely to arm injuries that sapped his command and velocity, Rocker’s flameout might have been a bigger deal for a less notorious character[3]. But pitching is a mental endeavor, and Rocker became his own worst enemy by turning the world against him. Had Rocker possessed the common sense to self-censor (or, better yet, the self-awareness to overcome his prejudices) would the remainder of his baseball career have unfolded any differently? Was his arm doomed to deteriorate regardless of his mental make-up, or was his high-strung approach vitally fueled by his pent-up aggression? Or, was Rocker simply lucky to manage his suspect control in consecutive seasons, his shortcomings masked by the small sample size of bullpen duty? In a pure baseball sense, we’ll never know the truth behind Rocker’s rise and fall; thanks to Rocker’s personal life, we’ll never care. With a menacing playground-bully aesthetic and un-channeled aggression that dominated his on- and off-field persona, Rocker was nothing if not one-of-a-kind - at least, we can only hope so. Don’t stop the Chop.
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