Baseball doesn’t usually dominate the headlines in winter, but this year’s steroid scandals have transformed the summer game into a year-round controversy.

Suddenly the great American pastime has been tainted by unfairness, the remarkable slugging records of recent years have become questionable. Even the politicians have jumped into the media circus, or perhaps the media attention has lured our elected officials, always eager for distraction from their real jobs.

Germany is suffering from its own sporting scandal, which has begun to spread across Europe. Here it’s all about fussball, soccer, the only sport which really matters. In January, a minor league referee was arrested here in Berlin and charged with manipulating games in the service of “the Croatian gambling Mafia,” if such an organization exists. The possibility that the referees could be throwing games deeply shocked German society. Doubts about the purity of the national sporting obsession were painfully broadcast in all media.

Since then a player has been arrested, details about bribes of $20,000 or more have come out, and half-a-dozen games have been declared void. The alleged Croatian betters haven’t said a word.

Low-scoring soccer is one of the few sports where a referee can influence the outcome with a couple of calls. Goals can be prevented by offsides calls against the offensive team, while goals can be created through penalty kicks awarded for fouls directly in front of the goal.

The scandal over manipulated soccer has spread in two ways across Europe.

Referees, always the butt of anger and derision by fans and players, are even more vulnerable now when they make close calls. In response, European referees and league organizers have called for more respect for the vast majority of honest referees. But emotions, much less in control anyway in European soccer than in any American sport, are increasingly directed at the closest referee.

Jose Mourinho, the coach of the leading English team, Chelsea, accused the Swedish referee Anders Frisk of illegally meeting the coach of Barcelona during halftime of the Chelsea-Barcelona Champions-League match, and then calling unfairly against Chelsea. Soon Frisk and his family were receiving daily death threats. Frisk, known as one of the finest referees in Europe, has just decided to retire from the sport, despite the pleas of other leading European referees.

The unheard-of possibility that soccer games in Germany were manipulated has also opened a long-overdue public discussion of systematic manipulation across eastern Europe. A recent book argues that the head of the East German secret police, Erich Mielke, insured that his favorite team consistently won the East German championship in the years before the Berlin Wall fell.

Such government interference appears to have continued long after the fall of Communism in Czechoslovakia, in order to insure that at least one team could compete at the international level with the traditional powerhouses of soccer. The Austrian professional soccer league will set up a commission to investigate allegations of fixed games. Recently, the Greek system, in which powerful team bosses hire suggestible referees to insure proper outcomes, has come under public attack.

In December, unusually large sums were bet on an international game between Panionios Athens and Dynamo Tiflis (from Georgia), picking the exact outcome: 1-0 at halftime for Tiflis and 5-2 final for Athens, with the final two goals scored in the last couple of minutes.

Revelations about dishonesty and manipulation in sport make headlines both in Germany and in the U.S. Media and politicians express righteous outrage, their favorite stance, but the public seems genuinely shocked and disillusioned. Yet in both countries, business scandals, involving hundreds of times more money, appear to be accepted as a normal part of business.

Congress appears more outraged by a few baseball players on steroids than by the billions of dollars looted by the managers of Enron, WorldCom and other criminal enterprises masquerading as normal businesses. Perhaps the public’s faith in the honesty of the economic sphere is so low, that manipulating sports is more of a shock than manipulating stock prices.

Steve Hochstadt lives in Lewiston and teaches history at Bates College. He is temporarily teaching in Germany and can be reached at [email protected].