Bud Selig has been preaching the same sermon for so long that the congregations that pack (or more recently, fail to pack) stadiums every day have become unaffected by the rhetoric involved in convincing the average baseball fan that Major League Baseball's drug testing program is in fact adequate. But an unsettling reality is beginning to become all too clear in the minds of baseball fans of all ages. Regardless of who is tested, and how often they are tested, steroid use in professional sports (including baseball) is here to stay.
When the NFL accepted this blatantly obvious truth, and was subsequently able to stop dwelling on it, football exploded into the omnipotent god of professional sports that we know and love today. This is why it came as a surprise to no one, and more importantly, why no one cared, when Shawne Merriman tested positive for steroids 2006.
In fairness, a four-week suspension without pay is a steep penalty, but to this day everyone, including me (a Chiefs fan), recognizes Merriman as one of the most talented young linebackers in the league. He also manages to draw a chorus of 70,000 cheers from the fans in Qualcomm stadium for eight Sundays every year, although his celebration dances are inexplicably unappreciated by opposing crowds. Either way, "Lights Out" Merriman is no Barry Bonds to sports fans.
You remember Barry Bonds, right? The antithesis of Brett Favre. The guy who never retired and nobody wants or likes. He's strikingly similar to Merriman, with the lone deviation (aside from being genuinely unlikeable) being that Bonds has never actually tested positive for steroids. Sure, he's enjoyed freakishly ballooned power numbers, but we (the Bonds-haters) still own the burden of proof.
So why do we hate Bonds and not Merriman? The answer is unfortunately simple. We don't hate steroids or even steroid use. We don't even hate being lied to or tricked by our favorite athletes. All we really hate is being the last to realize the prevalence of steroid use, and in our anger, we've chosen to sacrifice our once-favorite players.
Barry Bonds, Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa, and Alex Rodriguez are no more guilty than Shawne Merriman, they just make more convenient scapegoats for the truly guilty (yet again, this is you and me, Bonds-hater).
We are guilty of enabling their steroid use by remaining willingly and blissfully ignorant of it. We realize this, and we hate it.
June 27, 2009
Kyle Jahner:
Can’t agree there Paul.
1- speak for yourself. I do hate steroid use. Many do. And the victims of them include: clean players who lose money to guys with PED inflated stats, kids who think they have to use them to compete on the higher levels, and the eventual users, especially the ones that don’t make it, who now have serious health problems. (If you don’t think they are harmful you are nuts. Go ask any former pro wrestler. If you can find one that lived past 45.)
2- You put blame at the feet of fans; what should they have done? Whose job is it to protect the players of a league; some guy that goes into a stadium to watch them play? Or the people that govern the league they play in (including management and the unions here)?
3- The real differences between baseball and football:
A- Numbers. They are/were sacred in baseball. Everyone knows what 4,256, 714, 755, .406, 1.12, and 61 mean. You can never truly compare eras, but baseball could more so than any sport. And even if it’s a bit silly and revisionist, it was important. No one can tell you how many HR Bonds finished with. Steroids destroyed something that meant a lot to a sport. Merriman is judged on more than stats. In baseball, stats are a pure, incontrovertible measure of success. and steroids skews them more directly than in football.
B- Steroids help more in football. And with testers always lagging behind masking agents, NFL players almost have to cheat. Strength and power are too pivotal. That said, at least the field is relatively level, and Shawn is competing likely against other users. (Again, the health risks still make this NOT ok to me…) In baseball a guy like Ichiro can hit a baseball 400 feet. Power helps, but some guys just have a natural power. Others can get by without by being singles hitters or speed guys. Read: if you are talented, you don’t need to cheat. ARod and Bonds were HOFers without roids. And their narcissism led them to cheat out their contemporaries; this is worse to me than guys using it because their livelihood relied on it. And when players do that and get bigger contracts for bloated numbers, that money generally comes right out of the hands of their non-cheating colleagues. Thus, again, anyone with any perspective on the topic puts blame on management and the players unions for not protecting the players or the game’s integrity. And just because that same person goes to a ball game does NOT mean they helped inject their teams’ star slugger and does NOT mean they don’t care. Any “not caring” they do is out of cynicism, cynicism caused by a lying management and greedy players unions.
Drugs will always be a part of sports, we’re agreed there. But you grossly oversimplify the issue, and dismiss it too easily. 36+ homer seasons are way down the last two years. It is getting better. It may never be back to normal, but we are working towards getting at least a semblance of trust back in baseball.
June 27, 2009
Paul Foeller:
Hey Kyle. Your comments are appreciated. I’m not perfect, and sometimes the readers catch mistakes I make. That being said, I have two things I’d like to say.
1) You’re right. I should have explicitly stated my disdain for both the effects of steroids and the example they set for children. My point was more that if we really hated the steroids, and not their negative side effects, we would not hate cheaters in one sport and not in another.
2) If you bought a state-of-the-art plasma tv from a company that very obviously, but was never proven to have, used child labor to drive down prices, are you supporting the company and their practices by buying their tv? I think you are, and the same is true of attending ball games if a certain player is obviously juicing.
To Kyle and other readers, all comments, including criticisms, are greatly appreciated. This is a site by sports fans, for sports fans. You make the news here as much as I do. Call me out if you need to to. As long as it’s like Kyle’s post, I’ll appreciate it.
June 28, 2009
Kyle Jahner:
Point on the child labor-intensive TV taken, not a bad analogy. I agree, but that’s going to be the general populations’ response to everything. It takes something REALLY messed up to promote a mass, grass-roots movement to get people unified into action.
Take the situation in Iran. That government has been relatively non-democratic for 30 years. It hasn’t always represented the will of the people. But it took a horrendous election with so many obvious signs of foul play it was just utterly silly, for people to be truly moved against it. Hell, and people under awful governments all over the world that make ours actually look clean and competent deal with it because it takes a lot to unify the masses…more than an intellectualized moral stand against steroids, which while dangerous, pale as insignificant compared to these much more pressing issues. Even your child-labor example shows this. How many people really research and act on what they know about companies’ business practices? Not enough to make it unprofitable, in many cases.
In baseball, fans never protested racism; it took a courageous Jackie Robinson and Branch Rickey to break that down, not the fans. The only time fans really turned on baseball was after the 1994 strike where everyone refused to get a deal done when everyone involved was making obscene money anyway. An allegedly fixed World Series, blatant discrimination, and the treating of players like indentured servants before free agency never got fans to budge en masse. They liked baseball, and none of these problems/moral conflicts took enough away from their enjoyment of the sport to, as a whole, raise their fist and turn away.
So historically, no matter what the institution, its leaders and participants almost invariably have to create the kind of change baseball needs. Ideally, you’re right, but realistically, people have too many differences of opinion to unite until things get really bad. Fans have an uncanny ability to rationalize away these mental conflicts and keep showing up at the stadium. I’m just glad baseball is shaping up at least a little bit. Change must come from within.