Hope springs eternal with each opening day. But even as the sun rises on the new Major League Baseball season, skies are cloudy for the game we love. Echoes of the Mitchell Report's j'accuse still reverberate. One assumes more names are forthcoming - if not in official documents, then at least in Jose Canseco's juicy new tell-all. But it's worth remembering that, in one way or another, the sport has always had a split personality.

Baseball is a game of verdant fields, of balletic athleticism, of beery sunny Sunday afternoons. It's also one of cheating and meanness and corruption and greed. "Some ballplayers were alcoholics, others gamblers," writes Northeastern University School of Law professor Roger I. Abrams in his new book, The Dark Side of the Diamond: Gambling, Violence, Drugs and Alcoholism in the National Pastime (Rounder). "Some were violent sociopaths. Although appealing as an escape from day-to-day life, baseball reflected what we are as a society, warts and all."

It still does. Just look at Elijah Dukes, who this past year texted a photo of a gun to his estranged wife. ("You dead, dawg," he intoned on the attendant voice mail.) Or Scott Spiezio, who was recently charged with drunk driving and assault and battery (and four other counts, including hit-and-run and aggravated assault). Or Jim Leyritz, who kicked off 2008 by pleading not guilty to DUI manslaughter. Guys like that make jerks like A-Rod (opting out, then in, for mega-millions) or Nomar (snubbing kids on Dodgers autograph day) seem saintly.

This spring, the usual annual crop of baseball books is hitting shelves. But not all offer heartwarming tales of father-son catches and scrappy bench-player heroics. Rather - perhaps feeling that ill wind blowing in from right field - many are zeroing in on the darker aspects of America's game: baseball's seven deadly sins.

1) RACISM

In Cleveland, using the words "racism" and "baseball" in the same sentence brings to mind the name and logo of a certain home team. But the history of the sport is rife with stories of real people facing more than symbolic disrespect and even crime based on the color of their skin. Death threats were mailed to Hank Aaron as he chased home-run history. Jackie Robinson was summoned to Fenway for a tryout, only to hear a voice yell, "Get that nigger off the field!" from the dark of the grandstand, thereby ensuring the Sox would be the last baseball team to integrate. (Even the Bruins beat them to it.) As Abrams writes in The Dark Side, 19th-century superstar Cap Anson would have no truck with gambling, tobacco or booze, "as long as the sport banned all black ballplayers from the game."

It wasn't much better for minorities who were allowed to play. In Chief Bender's Burden: The Silent Struggle of a Baseball Star (University of Nebraska Press), journalist Tom Swift has crafted a substantial, vivid story of one of the best pitchers of the game's early years. Charles Albert Bender was a member of the Ojibwa tribe. He was much loved by his Philadelphia Athletics teammates. But opponents, fans and media were a different story. Newspapers portrayed him as a crude caricature. "I'm sorry, old Pitch-Em-Heap," said dead-ball-era star "Turkey" Mike Donlin as he strode to the plate, "but here's where you go back to the reservation." At the Polo Grounds during the 1905 World Series, the cat calls shrieked: "Back to the teepee for you!"

As we look forward to the 2008 campaign of Jacoby Ellsbury, the first Navajo in the majors (and on the other side of the rivalry, Yankee flamethrower Joba Chamberlain is a member of the Winnebago tribe), it's worth remembering a time when it was a bit harder for a Native American to play America's game.

2) VIOLENCE

"He came straight for me, followed by half a dozen players with bats in their hands. He hit me in the face with his fist, knocked me over, jumped on me, kicked me, spiked me and booted me behind the ear."

Those are the words of Claude Lueker, a heckler - crippled, with only half a hand - describing getting his ass kicked by Ty Cobb in 1912. It comes courtesy of Ty Cobb: Safe at Home (Lyons), a new book by Don Rhodes that offers a fair-minded assessment of the off-field life of one of the game's most talented and notorious figures.

Cobb is far from the only player prone to violence and ill temper. (And, truthfully, Lueker was asking for it.) The game is full of bust-ups and scraps: Roger Clemens tossing a jagged bat shard at Mike Piazza, Pedro Martinez tossing Don Zimmer to the ground, raging Lou Piniella getting tossed from some 60 games over the years. As Abrams quotes Willie Mays in The Dark Side, "For all its gentility, its almost leisurely pace, baseball is violence under wraps."

This diamond can be rough. Certain traditional rules are strictly enforced by the players themselves. Ross Bernstein's The Code: Baseball's Unwritten Rules and Its Ignore-at-Your-Own-Risk Code of Conduct (Triumph) - its cover is the iconic image of 46-year-old Nolan Ryan whaling the shit out of Robin Ventura's face - offers a glimpse at exactly how uniformed personnel (hint: not umpires) govern the goings-on inside the lines: bean balls and bench-clearing brawls, chargings of the mound and collisions at the plate, showboating and sliding hard into second.

Just this past summer one sacrosanct rule was broken by former Red Sox second baseman Jose Offerman, attempting a comeback with the Long Island Ducks. "No matter how mad you get," writes Bernstein, "or how badly you want to bash your opponent's brains in, you cannot under any circumstances use your bat as a weapon." (Offerman didn't just break baseball's social contract. He broke the pitcher's finger. And he broke the law - he was arrested after the game.)

3) CHEATING

As bad as this steroids saga is, it still pales in comparison with the scandal perpetrated by the Pale Hose in 1919, when eight members of the Chicago White Sox conspired to throw the World Series. In the new paperback edition of this past year's Baseball: A History of America's Favorite Game (Modern Library), New York Times writer George Vecsey calls them "the lost boys of baseball, lashed together . . . in a ship that can never return to harbor." In The Dark Side, Abrams avers that the crisis "exemplified the decline of American morals in the period following the first World War." But cheating and corruption have always been part of baseball.

In The Code, Bernstein chronicles the knavish ways players in this "gentleman's game" sometimes try to gain competitive advantage: spiking second basemen; scuffing and sliming balls; boning, corking and tarring bats; and the infamous hidden-ball trick (a specialty of Mikey Lowell). Devious tactics are only bad when they're used by the other guy, of course. When they're employed by your team, what's the fuss?

Of course, sometimes a method offers its own disincentive. Bernstein has a theory as to why you don't see many spitballs anymore - and it has nothing to do with better umpiring: "Whenever a spitball pitcher took to the mound, by the end of the game the ball would be a slippery mess, full of phlegm and snot. The infielders would cringe when they had to field a ground ball and throw it to first base. Nobody wanted to touch that thing."

4) SUBSTANCE ABUSE

It arguably only adds to the game's colorful history that Dock Ellis threw a no-hitter on LSD, or that Bill "Spaceman" Lee claimed to sprinkle marijuana on his buckwheat cakes, or that David Wells admitted to pitching his perfect game while "half drunk."

But booze and drugs have taken terrible tolls on too many players. Consider what cocaine did to Doc Gooden and Darryl Strawberry, or how heroin has derailed the promising career of Peabody's Jeff Allison, a Florida Marlins pitching prospect.

The allure has always been there. In Chief Bender's Burden, Swift points out that, in those pre-Prohibition days, "the nature of the game was conducive to recreational drinking; since games were played during the day and half of them were played on the road, players often had evenings free and no commitments that prevented trips to watering holes." Managers would routinely cover for guys, winking at journalists when games were missed by hung-over players. ("Out of condition," the scribes would write.)

In Baseball, Vecsey reminds us of the cocaine case in 1983 that sent four Kansas City Royals to jail, and of the drug-hastened deaths of ballplayers Alan Wiggins and Eric Show. In The Dark Side, Abrams notes how, in the past, it wasn't unusual for soused fans to charge the field and argue with umps; Boston Braves megastar Mike "King" Kelly regularly "bowled up" on booze before games; 19th-century slugger Pete Browning claimed that "I can't hit the ball until I hit the bottle."

At least today's fans have a strong deterrent from overindulging: who can afford to when the beers at the Ja . . . uh . . . Progressive Field cost almost as much as six-packs in a store??

5) GAMBLING

Pete Rose is a pariah. One wishes it weren't so, but he brought it upon himself. By the time - while promoting his book - he at long last admitted to betting on the game, "even tolerant fans had lost sympathy with him," Vecsey writes in Baseball. "He realized he faced a very long wait before any commissioner would ever reinstate him. Rose had wanted to become Ty Cobb. Instead he had become Shoeless Joe Jackson."

Poor Pete was only following in the cleated footsteps of generations of players and fans. In The Dark Side, Abrams points out that, as far back as the first World Series in 1903, massive cash was changing hands. The Pittsburgh Pirates had pooled $10,000 to wager they'd win the National League pennant, and once they had, the Boston Post reported in October that "thousands of dollars are being wagered on the series" between the Pirates and the Red Sox.

As you surely know, the Red Sox won, five games to three. But did you know that made their fans - many of them members of the fabled Royal Rooters - very wealthy? Some punters were wagering as much as $3500. (In today's dollars, that's $82,835.)

As the century went on, the sport made sporadic efforts to self-police. The most notable examples, often forgotten these days, were Mickey Mantle and Willie Mays, both long since retired, being banned for life by Bowie Kuhn for taking jobs at Atlantic City betting rooms as PR flacks and autograph signers. A casino, Kuhn opined, was "no place for a baseball hero and Hall of Famer." (Both were soon reinstated by Peter Ueberroth.)

Since then, however, the game has taken a more conflicted stance on gambling. Clubs are now allowed to accept ad money from casinos, Abrams points out. "Gambling is legal everywhere," he quotes Bud Selig as saying. "So, as life changes and society changes, frankly we have also made some changes." If those changes also make you lots of money, all the better.

6) Corporatization, Yuppification, Dumbification

Jack Murphy Stadium, erstwhile home to the San Diego Padres, was named after the late local sportswriter who helped bring the team to town - until it was renamed Qualcomm Stadium. (Rolls off the tongue, no?) Here in Cleveland we have a stadium named for an insurance company. In Houston, beloved and historic Enron Field offered fans the chance to forget, for a few hours, that they'd been swindled out of their life savings.

Such is the way of life in today's game. Remember when they wanted to emblazon ads for Spider-Man 2 on the bases? Ads in stadiums are nothing new, mind you. Just think of all the ads for cigarettes, gin and razor blades that used to spangle the Green Monster (Boston's Fenway Park). But these days things are different. "The ancient builders of the sport might be mystified by the dreadful din blasting from the loudspeakers or the air-conditioned luxury boxes separating the shrimp-eaters and wine drinkers from the actual fans," Vecsey writes in Baseball.

This evolution of the game is to its detriment, says deadspin.com editor Will Leitch in his book God Save the Fan: How Preening Sportscasters, Athletes Who Speak in the Third Person, and the Occasional Convicted Quarterback Have Taken the Fun Out of Sports (And How We Can Get It Back) (Harper). The baseball-watching experience, on TV and at the ballpark, has been degraded, he writes, be it by beer advertisers who "not only think [men are] morons, but also that we're monsters," or by brainless fans in the stands. ("If you have a sign that spells out the name of the network showing the game, you are a douchebag.")

Singled out for contempt: Yankee Stadium. "There's not a stadium in sports that's a less enjoyable place to watch a sporting event," Leitch writes, likening it to a "wealthy uncle's house, the one who never talks to you, [and] works for some evil law firm somewhere." (The "ASS-HOLLLLE!" chants are charming, too.)

Soon, Stade Fasciste will be demolished. But rejoice not - it will only be replaced by a gargantuan, gleaming edifice that's just like its old self, but more so. More boorish fans. More nauseating symbols of arrogance and entitlement. Louder loudspeakers for "Cotton-Eye Joe" and "God Bless America." God help us all.

7) Performance-Enhancing Drugs

Don't piss off Jose Canseco. Not because he'll fly into a veiny, red-faced rage, shirt torn in two by his massive biceps as he grabs the nearest Louisville Slugger and smashes all he sees to smithereens. (Although it's not hard to believe that's possible.) No, it's because when Jose feels slighted, Jose names names.

Canseco's previous tell-all, 2005's Juiced: Wild Times, Rampant 'Roids, Smash Hits, and How Baseball Got Big (William Morrow), was just the opening salvo. Now that the Mitchell Report has given the imprimatur of legitimacy to the charges leveled there, he's feeling flush with self-satisfaction. And so we await Vindicated: Big Names, Big Liars, and the Battle to Save Baseball, to be published on April 1, just in time for opening day. According to its publisher, Simon & Schuster, it'll "[blow] the lid off the steroids scandal in baseball - revealing its biggest players and naming its never-before-implicated names."

Canseco may feign moral outrage, promising a meditation "on the future integrity of America's most celebrated pastime." But we all know he's really just picking at the scab.

Meanwhile, one has to feel bad for Jonathan Mayo, whose new book, Facing Clemens: Hitters on Confronting Baseball's Most Intimidating Pitcher (Lyons), is being published at about the worst possible time. Enough ink has been spilled about the Texas Con Man's travails of late that more here would be superfluous. But it's safe to say a prurient reading public probably won't be much interested in buying a book that talks only about the Rocket's pitching - even one that gets the straight dope from guys like Cal Ripken, Ken Griffey Jr. and Sox hitting coach Dave Magadan about what it's like to dig into the batters' box against him.

Whether or not Clemens is telling the truth, PED use in baseball has a far longer history than some realize. In The Dark Side, Abrams reminds us that, in 1889, Hall of Fame pitcher James "Pud" Galvin availed himself of the "Brown-S�quard elixir," a testosterone treatment "derived from the testicles of a guinea pig and a dog" that was said to fortify and rejuvenate. Galvin was the first pitcher to reach 300 wins - and the first to juice.

Far from the last. Be it the cream or the clear, growth hormones or greenies, performance enhancers have always been part of the game. ("The funniest thing I ever saw in baseball was Pete Rose's greenies kicking in during a rain delay," Vecsey quotes one of Charlie Hustle's teammates saying.)

One suspects they may always be. Thankfully, then, there are books like The 33-Year-Old Rookie: How I Finally Made it to the Big Leagues After 11 Years in the Minors (Ballantine), in which Phillies catcher Chris Coste chronicles his agonizingly slow journey to the Show. At many points, it may have been tempting to seek shortcuts. But Coste did it clean.