How to Think about Baseball Players and Steroids
Even though baseball is the most historically conscious of all American sports, most of us check our thinking selves at the ballpark turnstiles. I first started writing about baseball history some 25 years ago, and I’ve been struck ever since by the emotions governing most fans’ relationship to the game, emotions born and nurtured in childhood that make fans resist the adult, business-dominated world of professional sports.
I don’t think performance-enhancing drugs are a good thing. I just don’t see how, if we want to root for winners above all else, we can ever expect players to spurn anything that can give them the extra edge. Here’s a piece I wrote about Barry Bonds, Mark McGwire, drugs, and the Hall of Fame, published January 16 in the Philadelphia Inquirer.
The entire history of baseball is unsavory.
By Warren Goldstein
The continuing controversy about baseball and performance-enhancing drugs is, alas, no aberration. It’s actually quite characteristic of the entire history of professional baseball.
Not having to think about Barry Bonds, his records, and his likely drug use has been one of my few sports pleasures during the off-season. And now, just a month before spring training, the whole issue is back. Bonds, the New York Daily News reported, tested positive for amphetamines last summer. And the retired, steroid-tainted slugger Mark McGwire failed to reach the Hall of Fame in his first year of eligibility - despite hitting 583 homers, the seventh-highest total in the history of baseball.
McGwire’s weasel congressional testimony in 2005 - “I’m not here to talk about the past” - apparently did him in, at least for this year, while the Bonds story provided yet another treat for Barry-haters, as it seems he first claimed the pills came from reserve player Mark Sweeney’s locker. We’re clearly in for more, especially since Bonds hopes to play with the Giants just long enough to break Henry Aaron’s all-time record of 755 home runs (he needs 22).
There is, alas, no solution to this problem - short of plugging our ears or refusing to read or ignoring the game, hardly helpful ideas for baseball fans. (Although I confess I’ve considered giving up the major-league game in favor of minor-league ball, where you’re closer to the action and don’t have to spend $100 for a pair of faraway seats and a couple of hotdogs.)
Researching the game’s early history, I thought I would discover genteel clubs in the world of the robber barons, green spaces in urban slums, honorable ideals standing against unrestrained greed. Instead, I found a business like the other Gilded Age industries: thieving, conniving owners seeking monopoly control; bosses picking players’ wallets and fattening their own by using the reserve rule; political connections, blacklists, and Pinkerton detectives; players organizing unions; managers playing nasty ethnic and racial politics; players who gambled, boozed, and threw games, all of which helped create the infamous 1919 “Black Sox” scandal.
Fans have always looked away from baseball’s business side. It detracts from our emotional involvement with a game we learn to play or love in childhood, when we know nothing about contracts, performance-enhancing drugs, or the wiles of professional gamblers. That’s the real meaning of the most famous lament in the history of baseball, the 10-year-old boy pleading for “Shoeless Joe” Jackson to “Say it ain’t so”: to deny not only that his hero had conspired to throw the Series, but that the game itself had been hijacked by the grown-up world of money and contracts - and crooks.
We fans - including sportswriters - prefer the “purer” world of Cal Ripken Jr. and Tony Gwynn (both elected to the Hall of Fame over McGwire) to the apparently more sordid one of Bonds and McGwire, Jose Canseco and Rafael Palmeiro. Unfortunately, there is no such world - except in fantasy. Even the baseball commissioner who banned the “Black Sox” gang did so mainly to protect the owners’ commercial interests. He got lucky when a genial, boozing, womanizing, reform-school graduate transformed the sport into a home-run-hitting fest that attracted paying fans in droves. The commissioner averted his eyes while the owners counted the take.
Bowls of “greenies” (uppers) were commonplace in clubhouses in the 1980s; sportswriters and trainers, league officials and owners all knew about it and looked the other way. Which records - or ballplayers - should we, or the guardians of the Hall of Fame, consider “pure” enough for consideration?
Should we go back before the advent of the designated hitter (1973)? Before players had to wear helmets (1971), or before the leagues split into divisions (1969) and added four teams? How about before the Dodgers left Brooklyn (1957), or before Babe Ruth started hitting home runs (1919), or before the pitching rubber got moved to 60 feet, six inches (1893), or before African Americans were banned from the majors (1888), or before clubs started paying whole rosters (1867), or individual players, illegally, of course (1860), or… you get the idea.
After all, doesn’t cheating do well in baseball? Most fans seem to want Shoeless Joe in the Hall of Fame, even though he admitted taking $5,000 to throw the 1919 Series. Hall of Fame pitcher Gaylord Perry, who pitched from 1962 to 1983, titled his autobiography Me and the Spitter, when the spitball had been completely illegal since 1934.
We may say we prefer fields of dreams, but in the real world, men and women cheat for love, money, and recognition. And we watch them, in their games, their music, and their movies - without wanting them at our Thanksgiving table.
Hey, pitchers and catchers report in a month. I can’t wait.
February 19th, 2007 at 7:04 am
I do not think steroids or other performance enhancing chemicals are necessarily bad, nor do I think their use is cheating in baseball or any other sport. I know this view is a minority one, and may have the burden of proof. But I actually think the burden is on those who just presume that steriods are cheating. So my question is: Why are steroids (or other use of chemicals) cheating? Given that we do not regulate other training methods, nor handicap genetic advantages, nor regulate nutrition and other supplements, nor regulate the use of analgesics, why are steroids different from these? In principle, there seems to be no difference at all. Is there are a principled difference between the “forbidden” chemicals and all of the other chemicals we allow?
February 20th, 2007 at 3:45 pm
Excellent bunch of questions, tdemarco. I have not been able to find such a principled difference, though once certain practices or substances are banned, then by definition using them is “cheating.” Still, an awful lot of folks trust their gut reactions on this one, and we’ve got a long way to go to get people to think more rationally about this issue.
February 26th, 2007 at 3:26 pm
You are correct that once (say) chemical A is banned by the official rules, then a player who takes A is cheating, or rule breaking. Although it is possible that not all rule-breaking is cheating. But of course this is question begging because the fundamental issue is whether these chemicals should be banned. Are there good reasons to do so? I do not think there are good reasons, except the prudential ones. That is, some of these chemicals taken in a certain way are harmful to one’s health. Hence, it is not (prudentially) good for the person, if he/she cares about his/her health. But one can easily find examples in which an athlete is willing to gamble with his/her health. In other words, the athlete’s personal health is not a more important value than (say) the value of playing excellently etc. I agree that we have a long way get the general public to think rationally about this. Presently, I do not think the public, nor sports officials, has a clue.