I doubt there is anyone who can name a soldier who died yesterday in Iraq, but we all know that a bunch of “star” professional baseball players took “performance enhancing drugs.” We know that the “powers” charged with keeping baseball clean didn’t do a very good job of it. We’re shocked and disappointed?
Though I’m not a baseball fan, as I see it as a sport for people who think soccer is too fast paced, I know enough about the game to surmise that anybody who gets paid $100,000 any time his bat touches a ball is going to do whatever he has to do to keep that ATM working. At least we can thank God that nobody playing football or basketball has ever touched steroids.
Does this mean that all the stars are criminals? Does this wipe out the last 20 years of World Series wins, or the records broken? Does this mean that the game is a fraud and they’re all cheaters?
Consider what our beloved baseball stars would be doing if there was no big league contract in their pockets. For the most part, they were poor kids from poor neighborhoods who showed athletic promise. A turn to the left and they could have been in prison. A turn to the right and they are behind the counter at a bodega. Straight ahead and they get a zillion dollars. Which sounds best to you?
So they go for the money and the glory and the applause. Can you blame them for wanting to be a sports hero? I can’t. And if steroids make the difference between hitting the ball out of the park or throwing 100 miles per hour, and having a brief and unremarkable career, are you shocked they took the risk? Remember, people shoot heroin and don’t even get a big league contract out of it. So steroids will harm them? So will starvation.
The question now is whether this revelation (I’m shocked. Shocked!) will mean that end of professional sports as we know it. After all, how can we now compare Barry Bonds with Babe Ruth. Or Roger Clemens with Roger Maris. It may yet turn out that professional wrestling is the only honest sport around.
The situation is not fixable, per se. We can’t undo the past 20 years and create some proportionality scale that will let us make sense of today’s drug enhanced box scores with those of past heroes. Nor, as Senator Mitchell implored, would we do well by rounding all these stars up and putting them in prison for their drug use. Of course, that makes our imprisoning all the other, no-star, drug users seem a little less than fair, but that’s only if a lack of intellectual integrity bothers you.
There is no good way out of this situation for anyone, sports icon or fan. But there’s a real problem with the 100,000 kids injecting steroids to be just like their heroes. Or perhaps the 1,000,000 taking some other drug because they never had the sports prowess to make steroids their drug of choice.
As much as I want to find it in my heart to worry my head off about baseball players, this silly mess just doesn’t merit that level of concern. Maybe Bud Selig can fine them all half their salaries since they started in the game and turn that money over to groups that will use it to deal with all the kids who have taken to drugs, whether anabolic or not, to soothe their angst for not having the inherent gifts that our sports heroes possess. They can keep their records and world series’ rings, as long as they make it right with society. That would work for me.
Addendum: Interesting post by Jeffrey Lipshaw at Concurring Opinions noting the misuse at WSJ Blog and elsewhere of claims that the Mitchell Report is a smear job based on “hearsay”. Taint no hearsay (other than the fact this obviously isn’t happening in a court of law) when the information comes from the fellow who’s jabbing the needles in himself. This doesn’t make it true, or above question, since it hasn’t been put through the rigors of cross-examination, but it surely isn’t hearsay.
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Wow. I thought for certain you would cover this from the perspective of guilt being assumed and a reputation tarnished without a trial. Just because some report says so.
Guilt is individual. This is about an indictment of professional baseball (though I can’t accept the premise that it’s baseball and not professional sports on the whole). See how you can never assume what will happen here.
Sure it’s an indictment of professional sports. But that doesn’t mean he had to name names. Now the names are forever besmirched.
Of course, they all probably did it, so I know it’s just an academic point. Mitchell wouldn’t have named these folks if they didn’t actually do it, right?
No, I don’t support Mitchell naming names. But then, I’m sure they can afford to hire some decent legal talent to go after Mitchell for libel and slander if it’s false. Remember, this isn’t the government that did this. It’s the hand that fed them.
Well, some witness interviews were done in conjunction with gov’t cooperation agreements with the FBI and IRS.
And because baseball has an antitrust exemption, the feds can use the threat of removing that exemption as leverage to investigate.
So while baseball did this to its own, it wouldn’t be 100% accurate to say that there was no gov’t hand involved in getting the goods.
Are you just miserable that I didn’t jump up and down about them naming names? That’s a separate issue; I’m looking at the big picture. When they indict someone, then we’ll figure out whether they’ve got the goods or not.
The better question you’ve inadvertantly raised is why the government is sticking its nose into private investigations, using its power to assist a non-prosecutorial investigation run by MLB. Why does MLB get to use our tax-paid law enforcers to do their private bidding? What business does the IRS or FBI have in being a “laboring oar” in the MLB investigation? If they don’t have enough to do, I have some investigations they can help out with.
It’s a “weapon of mass distraction” right out of 1984. Remember when Bush gave a speech a couple years ago and one of his main points was a goal to wipe out steroids in MLB? It was stunning, as if he felt like this was just what families needed, to know Barry Bonds was steroid free.