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| Braun's suspension has set off a wave of yelling, but is discussion more needed? Photo Credit: ESPN.com |
Steroids for use as a performance enhancer for athletes were demonized most famously by Lyle Alzado, an ex-National Football League player who copped to using them while he was active in the league. Steroid use was incorrectly linked to the brain cancer that claimed his life, and from that point, the smear campaign against the substances began in earnest. Funnily, PED usage in the NFL remains largely underpublicized. Sure, Von Miller will sit for four games for using a banned substance, but like many other football players who have been suspended for using PEDs, he won't be ostracized by fans, teammates, or media the way that anyone who has socked a few more dingers than some baseball purists are used to them socking will get, whether they've flunked a drug test or not.
Whether Dick Vitale is going apeshit crazy over the lack of severity on Ryan Braun's 65 game suspension or Rick Reilly showing everyone why he should never ever serve on a jury by his badgering of Chris Davis, baseball seems to be the sport that steroid hysteria has attacked the most. Think about the fact that Dick Vitale is among the screaming heads for Braun's career for a second. Incidentally Vitale is known primarily for combining sing-songy baby talk with unflattering and unprofessional fanboyism for Duke basketball in his commentary, and his voice screaming out how he's sick to his stomach over a dude cheating at a game that is not in his supposed field of expertise should be taken seriously? THANKS ESPN EMBRACE DEBATE YAY.
My reactions to steroids in baseball have admittedly come off on the extreme left side of the issue for effect, and as a fan, strictly as a fan, I could not care less if the taters Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa mashed in 1997 were au naturale or juiced to the gills. My lizard-brained tendencies would love to see mandatory drugs just to see how crazy baseball can get. However, I know that there are risks involved with any modification to an industry. What are the consequences if PEDs can be linked inexorably to performance, and a player who uses them hits a ball so hard that it goes faster than a normal line drive? And what if that line drive can kill a guy? Does Major League Baseball have a moral responsibility to police the wellness and health of its employees? As a wrestling fan who sees the benefits of having such a program in place in his own main arena of fandom, I would lean towards saying yes. So in essence, I am not for unfettered use of PEDs in baseball.
However, I am not totally opposed to their use either. I don't know the full extent of what these hormones can and can't do, and whether they are healthful to use in moderation. I don't know how much fungible value these drugs add to a player. Theoretically, yes, a guy like Skip Schumaker, a marginal talent who could thrive on a Major League roster as a utility player, could be usurped by someone using PEDs who might otherwise be relegated to career minor league status. However, enough career minor leaguers and marginal Major League players have been busted for substance use, making me believe that being a good-to-great Major League ballplayer has a lot more to do than the chemicals injected or ingested into the body or rubbed on the skin.
Right now, sanctimonious journalists looking to protect the non-existent sanctity of a game (A FUCKING GAME) claim to have answers to questions that they never even thought about asking. Odds are, there are PEDs banned by MLB that will end up benefiting the human race in the long run, longer than baseball will exist, even. Human growth hormone is the Lord Voldemort of PEDs, but it also seems to have a richness of medical benefits that scientists and doctors are just starting to discover.
Meanwhile, cortisone, which is a steroid, is used commonly in clubhouses to stave off pain and allow injured athletes to play on damaged body parts. Its purpose, suppressing the immune system for anti-inflammatory purposes, seems retrograde with the body's natural urge to repair damage and more importantly, cause pain to afflicted areas to remind big dopes who don't know when to go to the hospital to go and get better treatment than just "continue playing on an injured limb and hope that it doesn't irreparably get worse." I don't know about you, but what the continued allowance of cortisone tells me is that owners, managers, and even the players themselves currently don't care about their own well-being enough to get treatment, and thus they're all ignoring their own moral obligation to maintain the health and wellness of everyone involved in baseball.
Is a game's "purity" worth promoting a culture of injury? I'd ask if the game ever had this mystical integrity. People like to say that Babe Ruth hit home runs on beer and hot dogs, not steroids. I see it more as Babe Ruth did it on segregation and an artificially decreased talent pool thanks to racist owners and commissioners like Kennesaw Mountain Landis. Hank Aaron's home run record isn't so pure either when accusations of "greenie" use have dogged him over the years. Even so, is PED use more morally objectionable than racism of players like Ty Cobb or of entire organizations like the Philadelphia Phillies?
And what caused a player to die on a MLB field? Oh nothing except the practice of scuffing balls to the point where they couldn't be safely seen by players. However, even after Ray Chapman was killed by a spitball that he couldn't see, MLB STILL allowed guys who were "grandfathered" out of the ban to throw scuffed balls fourteen years after they instituted the ban in part because A GUY DIED ON THE FIELD BECAUSE OF A DOCTORED BASEBALL.
Abstract concepts like purity, hustle, grit, and setting an example for the kids all sound like great reasons to keep steroids banned, but they're really straw men that people looking to deflect dialogue and keep a game looking as pristine as they misremember it being in their youth. I don't have a problem with this romanticization of baseball, because in all honesty, I think people should be able to use the game as inspiration to wax poetic. "Casey at the Bat," "Take Me Out to the Ballgame," and Field of Dreams are all beloved pieces of art that have sprung from an ethereal love for the American pastime.
However, when romanticization gets in the way of real dialogue on the health of real live actual people within the game, then it can go straight to hell. Right now, the established order, owners using sportswriters as their attack dogs, dominates discussion, and that established order is resistant to change. The only constant in life is that it constantly changes. In the long term, those changes are good. No one can really gauge how damaging or beneficial to the game and more importantly its players PEDs are without having a real discussion on them. Maybe the conservatives within baseball are right and drugs are inherently bad (although it'll the first time reactionary response has ever been proven correct in history). But we won't know that for sure unless the other side isn't drowned out by cacophonous groupthink.