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A Performance-Enhancing Problem
Unless fans speak up against steroid use among players, our columnist fears Major League Baseball will keep playing down a potentially deadly problem WEB-EXCLUSIVE COMMENTARY
NewsweekMarch 10 - Some day, a not too distant day, Major League Baseball and the players’ union will have to face up to its steroids mess.
On that day, the league won’t get away any longer with telling its ball clubs to shut up on the subject. The union won’t be able to stall the issue or sidetrack it with blather about how steroids aren’t as dangerous as cigarettes.
That’s because some day, some dreadful day, they will be talking to the widows. And while there hasn’t been enough scientific study of the effects of steroids, human growth hormone and other performance-enhancing drugs to provide definitive medical evidence, I know and you know that these magic pills, shots and ointments will eventually have devastating consequences for some of the ballplayers who took them and, of course, for their families.
So I intend to hammer away at this issue relentlessly—and I suspect many of my colleagues to do so as well. Part of my resolve stems from guilt. Sure, I’ve written about steroids regularly. But I also wasted a lot time explaining away the home-run epidemic as a result of a combination of bad pitching, lighter bats, tightly-wound baseballs and smaller ballparks. And I joined—without making sufficient noise about my reservations—in the celebration of our new, record-smashing, baseball heroes.
But all along I knew in my gut that the biggest factor of all in the homer binge was performance-enhancing drugs, both legal and illegal (because baseball, unlike virtually every sport, didn’t bother banning some legal supplements). I knew, not just as home-run records were being annihilated, but every time I saw some hitter get fooled by a pitch, reach out off-balance and flick a one-handed swing that sent the pellet flying over the center field fence. I knew it just like everybody knew that Irish swimmer Michelle Smith was cheating when, suddenly in mid-career, she was transformed from an also-swam into a champion. Smith tested positive not all that long after the ’96 Olympics and was banned from the sport, but nobody took away or even asterisked the three gold medals she won in Atlanta.
Remember Michael Jackson back when he was just considered a really weird dude. Everybody looked at pictures of America’s most famous moonwalker and compared them with pictures of him as a younger man. Then we concluded that Jackson had undergone plastic surgery and had bleached his skin—and all the denials in the world from Jackson didn’t stop us from repeating that as fact. Remember Calista Flockhart who shrunk away before our eyes, leading us to proclaim—despite her protestations that she had a hearty appetite and a high metabolism—that she was an anorexic.
But we’re supposed to remain silent about athletes who cheat because until somebody tests positive, there’s no conclusive evidence. Because there are issues of law and criminality involved. Presumed innocent until proven guilty. We’re supposed to ignore common sense, the evidence of our own eyes and powerful circumstantial evidence, to give these spoiled athletes the benefit of the doubt. Give it to them while they rake in tens of millions of dollars from their cheatfest and, at the same time, erase from the record books some of the greatest names in what once was an illustrious game.
Who’s kidding whom? Is fitness what we’re talking about? Then when did “homunculus" become a word that appeared regularly in the baseball columns? Just take a glance at the pictures of some of these BALCO customers and either something sinister is going on or there is an Academy Award-winning makeup artist at work. One player who used to have the sleek look of a Hank Aaron now bears more of a resemblance to NFL superstar linebacker Ray Lewis. Another guy who in recent years strode like a behemoth across the field now looks like the “before” picture in those Charles Atlas kick-sand-in-your-face ads of my childhood.
But the guys who’ve been paraded before the grand jury in the BALCO case are just the ones who got a little—make that a lot—unlucky. Don’t fall for that “few bad apples” analogy. Don’t get confused by the 5-7 percent figure that was the failure rate in baseball’s trial steroids test last year. First of all, that was a failure rate for known steroids—and BALCO’s prized THG hadn’t yet been identified in the labs that police sports. And then understand that 5-7 percent flunked a test that they knew was coming—and when. I always did my best on those spelling tests when they gave me the words in advance and told me exactly when the test would be administered. D-O-G, C-A-T, S-T-E-R-O-I-D.
Please don’t take anything the athletes say, especially their denials, at face value. There has never been an athlete caught cheating with performance-enhancing drugs who has not denied using those drugs unequivocally at that time. When Ben Johnson tested positive at the Seoul Olympics and pictures revealed his biceps virtually exploding out of his body, he denied it vehemently. OK some, including Johnson, 'fessed up years later, perhaps out of guilt or possibly to sell a memoir. But at the moment they are nailed, they are all innocent, the labs all screwed up and if by some remote chance they actually acknowledge the possibilility that they took anything illegal, it was unwittingly. Maybe that was true years ago in East Germany, when athletes were lab rats for the state. But today’s elite pro athletes are far too sophisticated, their livelihoods too swell, to induce substances into their bodies without being aware of what they are taking.
This grotesquerie, this sham will go on until there is a clamor from the fans to rival that now emanating from the media. Major League Baseball and the unions may hate each other, but they fear you, the fan, more than they do the righteous noises now coming from Congress. When the Yankees visited the Red Sox last week down in Ft. Myers, they didn’t hesitate to bring A-Rod to the game. Sure some boos would rain down on the superstar who was almost Boston-bound this winter. But they were the old-fashioned kind, born of rivalry and respect. The guy they left back in Tampa was Jason Giambi, who was likely to be subjected to a less benevolent form of abuse.
Years ago, fans at Boston’s Fenway Park mocked muscle-bound slugger Jose Canseco by chanting, “ste-roids.” Back then Canseco, who in retirement has confessed to using steroids, amused the crowd by flexing his biceps in response. But this is no longer a laughing matter. So let the players, the teams, Bud Selig, and especially the union hear from you vociferously. This is the issue that truly matters, not whether baseball should keep the designated hitter, not whether winning the All-Star game warrants the home-field advantage in the World Series, not whether Pete Rose deserves to be in the Hall of Fame, not even the unlevel playing field. And who knows? If we all yell loud enough, we just might save some lives.
© 2004 Newsweek, Inc.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4507662/
EMAIL THE AUTHOR:
[email protected] <[email protected].
Unless fans speak up against steroid use among players, our columnist fears Major League Baseball will keep playing down a potentially deadly problem WEB-EXCLUSIVE COMMENTARY
NewsweekMarch 10 - Some day, a not too distant day, Major League Baseball and the players’ union will have to face up to its steroids mess.
On that day, the league won’t get away any longer with telling its ball clubs to shut up on the subject. The union won’t be able to stall the issue or sidetrack it with blather about how steroids aren’t as dangerous as cigarettes.
That’s because some day, some dreadful day, they will be talking to the widows. And while there hasn’t been enough scientific study of the effects of steroids, human growth hormone and other performance-enhancing drugs to provide definitive medical evidence, I know and you know that these magic pills, shots and ointments will eventually have devastating consequences for some of the ballplayers who took them and, of course, for their families.
So I intend to hammer away at this issue relentlessly—and I suspect many of my colleagues to do so as well. Part of my resolve stems from guilt. Sure, I’ve written about steroids regularly. But I also wasted a lot time explaining away the home-run epidemic as a result of a combination of bad pitching, lighter bats, tightly-wound baseballs and smaller ballparks. And I joined—without making sufficient noise about my reservations—in the celebration of our new, record-smashing, baseball heroes.
But all along I knew in my gut that the biggest factor of all in the homer binge was performance-enhancing drugs, both legal and illegal (because baseball, unlike virtually every sport, didn’t bother banning some legal supplements). I knew, not just as home-run records were being annihilated, but every time I saw some hitter get fooled by a pitch, reach out off-balance and flick a one-handed swing that sent the pellet flying over the center field fence. I knew it just like everybody knew that Irish swimmer Michelle Smith was cheating when, suddenly in mid-career, she was transformed from an also-swam into a champion. Smith tested positive not all that long after the ’96 Olympics and was banned from the sport, but nobody took away or even asterisked the three gold medals she won in Atlanta.
Remember Michael Jackson back when he was just considered a really weird dude. Everybody looked at pictures of America’s most famous moonwalker and compared them with pictures of him as a younger man. Then we concluded that Jackson had undergone plastic surgery and had bleached his skin—and all the denials in the world from Jackson didn’t stop us from repeating that as fact. Remember Calista Flockhart who shrunk away before our eyes, leading us to proclaim—despite her protestations that she had a hearty appetite and a high metabolism—that she was an anorexic.
But we’re supposed to remain silent about athletes who cheat because until somebody tests positive, there’s no conclusive evidence. Because there are issues of law and criminality involved. Presumed innocent until proven guilty. We’re supposed to ignore common sense, the evidence of our own eyes and powerful circumstantial evidence, to give these spoiled athletes the benefit of the doubt. Give it to them while they rake in tens of millions of dollars from their cheatfest and, at the same time, erase from the record books some of the greatest names in what once was an illustrious game.
Who’s kidding whom? Is fitness what we’re talking about? Then when did “homunculus" become a word that appeared regularly in the baseball columns? Just take a glance at the pictures of some of these BALCO customers and either something sinister is going on or there is an Academy Award-winning makeup artist at work. One player who used to have the sleek look of a Hank Aaron now bears more of a resemblance to NFL superstar linebacker Ray Lewis. Another guy who in recent years strode like a behemoth across the field now looks like the “before” picture in those Charles Atlas kick-sand-in-your-face ads of my childhood.
But the guys who’ve been paraded before the grand jury in the BALCO case are just the ones who got a little—make that a lot—unlucky. Don’t fall for that “few bad apples” analogy. Don’t get confused by the 5-7 percent figure that was the failure rate in baseball’s trial steroids test last year. First of all, that was a failure rate for known steroids—and BALCO’s prized THG hadn’t yet been identified in the labs that police sports. And then understand that 5-7 percent flunked a test that they knew was coming—and when. I always did my best on those spelling tests when they gave me the words in advance and told me exactly when the test would be administered. D-O-G, C-A-T, S-T-E-R-O-I-D.
Please don’t take anything the athletes say, especially their denials, at face value. There has never been an athlete caught cheating with performance-enhancing drugs who has not denied using those drugs unequivocally at that time. When Ben Johnson tested positive at the Seoul Olympics and pictures revealed his biceps virtually exploding out of his body, he denied it vehemently. OK some, including Johnson, 'fessed up years later, perhaps out of guilt or possibly to sell a memoir. But at the moment they are nailed, they are all innocent, the labs all screwed up and if by some remote chance they actually acknowledge the possibilility that they took anything illegal, it was unwittingly. Maybe that was true years ago in East Germany, when athletes were lab rats for the state. But today’s elite pro athletes are far too sophisticated, their livelihoods too swell, to induce substances into their bodies without being aware of what they are taking.
This grotesquerie, this sham will go on until there is a clamor from the fans to rival that now emanating from the media. Major League Baseball and the unions may hate each other, but they fear you, the fan, more than they do the righteous noises now coming from Congress. When the Yankees visited the Red Sox last week down in Ft. Myers, they didn’t hesitate to bring A-Rod to the game. Sure some boos would rain down on the superstar who was almost Boston-bound this winter. But they were the old-fashioned kind, born of rivalry and respect. The guy they left back in Tampa was Jason Giambi, who was likely to be subjected to a less benevolent form of abuse.
Years ago, fans at Boston’s Fenway Park mocked muscle-bound slugger Jose Canseco by chanting, “ste-roids.” Back then Canseco, who in retirement has confessed to using steroids, amused the crowd by flexing his biceps in response. But this is no longer a laughing matter. So let the players, the teams, Bud Selig, and especially the union hear from you vociferously. This is the issue that truly matters, not whether baseball should keep the designated hitter, not whether winning the All-Star game warrants the home-field advantage in the World Series, not whether Pete Rose deserves to be in the Hall of Fame, not even the unlevel playing field. And who knows? If we all yell loud enough, we just might save some lives.
© 2004 Newsweek, Inc.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4507662/
EMAIL THE AUTHOR:
[email protected] <[email protected].
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