Necessary Roughness

I found it disappointing, yet not unexpected, to find out the news about Barry Bonds and Jason Giambi and steroid use. Obviously, I am not the standard of human performance, but the magnitude of Barry Bonds’ achievements over his fellow players would indeed be legendary had he not used performance enhancing drugs. It’s like seeing a Ford Taurus breaking land speed records without any performance hardware.

The point of maintaining records, though, like his 73 homers in 2001, or most walks and highest slugging percentage in 2002, five MVP awards and 11 All-Star honors, is to compare his performance with those of ages past, like we do with Olympic and World records. The comparison is not completely clean, of course, since ball parks, baseball’s rules such as the Designated Hitter, and even the baseball have changed since the first professional baseball league in 1871. These changes, though, arguably affect the game less than the throwing of baseball games or drug use. How many home runs would Hank Aaron have, if he were doped up?

To me, it really doesn’t matter whether Barry “knew” the substances he were using were steroids. His cells knew. He’s the one being paid the bucks. He had the responsibility of reading labels on what went into his system. The statistics he put up are strong circumstantial evidence that the steroids worked. It would be like finding evidence that Pete Rose bet on his own team to lose. Did the steroids work? It’s the same question as asking, “Did Pete Rose shaft his team to win bets?” were Pete Rose to bet against his team. We would never be able to prove it objectively, but the leap of logic from the controlled experiment is not a far one.

If all this is verified, then Barry’s records should be wiped, or tagged with an asterisk. Mark McGwire’s 70 and Sammy Sosa’s 66 in 1998, too, if they inflated their performance against the rules (not saying they did or they didn’t). The same with Roger Maris, if his 61 in 1961 was assisted in the same fashion (likewise).

There’s plenty of blame to go around, like the MLB and other sports’ lax drug enforcement policies. They’ve not done their job in protecting the integrity of the games. Maybe the stats wouldn’t be so high if the drug use was eliminated. That’s OK, because the absolute magnitude of a statistic is not why we go to baseball games. Sure, baseball’s ticket sales ballooned in 1998 because of the home run race between McGwire and Sosa, but the difference wouldn’t have been so big had the game avoided the strike of 1994-95. I also submit that the race wouldn’t have been as big a deal had they used steroids and everyone knew about it. Let’s play the game with robots if sheer numbers are what we are looking for.

There is hope now for the game, because with older players coming out and fingering people who have used performance enhancing drugs, the message is getting across that we want clean players. Managers have said that players are getting smaller. We may never have another 70-HR hitter again, but I don’t see the game suffering because of that. We’ve gotten by without an 80-HR hitter for 133 years. If and when we do see another 70-HR hitter again, we’ll indeed know we saw something special.