Major League Baseball needed a shot in the arm after the
strike-ruined season of 1994. What it got instead was a shot in the
ass.
The current issue of Sports Illustrated reveals the
shocking news that large numbers of major leaguers routinely inject
themselves with horse-sized quantities of performance- and
body-enhancing steroids. These are often hypodermically injected
into the buttocks.
Controversy has swirled around former San Diego Padre Ken
Caminiti’s claim that he won the 1996 National League MVP award
while on ‘roids. What’s more, he estimated half of all players take
them.
Steroids are technically illegal, but can be procured with a
doctor’s prescription or by making an over-the-border run to the
pharmaceutical shacks lining Revolucion Avenue in Tijuana. They
produce testosterone and make you bigger, bulkier, and more
energetic.
It’s not just steroids, either. Legal over-the-counter products
like andro — adrostenedione, Mark McGwire’s favorite supplement —
and creatine can, like steroids, help turn the puniest, scrawniest
guy into a muscle-bound brute. That’s why one of the great trends
in baseball over the last decade hasn’t just been the increase in
balls flying over fences, but the increase in Ranier
Wolfcastle-like sluggers driving them.
These products can literally make you bigger. Your shirt and
pants sizes will grow. So will your head. One major leaguer is
reported to have seen his hat size grow more than two inches while
taking the juice.
One area that won’t grow? Your testicles, which can shrink and
float up into your body, since they’re no longer producing your
body’s testosterone. But that’s an occupational hazard many major
leaguers seem willing to accept.
One consequence of this scandal is it further removes today’s
game from that of the previous century. And that’s trouble for an
institution that trades on its history and tradition as much as
baseball does. Today’s baseball is fast becoming a fundamentally
different sport from that of most of the 20th century.
To get an edge in the past, cheaters might cork their bats. Now
they cork themselves. Statistics are grossly inflated as players
literally inflate themselves.
Over the last decade, we’ve seen a barrage of balls flying over
fences. Records aren’t just being broken, they’re being shattered.
Witness Mark McGwire, Barry Bonds, and Sammy Sosa all routinely
eclipsing Roger Maris’s longstanding record of 61 roundtrippers in
a season.
Everybody’s hitting home runs now. Before the 1990s, only one
player had hit more than 50 home runs in a season in two and a half
decades. That was Cincinnati’s George Foster, who clubbed 52
dingers in 1977. And he was considered the weak man in the
ten-member 50 HR club comprised of gods like Ruth, Mantle, Mays,
Foxx, and Greenberg.
Now they’re letting anybody in, including mediocrities like
Brady Anderson (Brady Anderson!) and Luis Gonzalez. Luis
Who? Exactly.
How many of the new sluggers used steroids or other
enhancements? It’s not clear. Certainly McGwire did. He was even
the ad pitchman for andro. Bonds is reported to use them. Brady
Anderson had to have used them. Sosa? Maybe, maybe
not.
When Roger Maris hit 61 home runs in 1961 to break Babe Ruth’s
34-year-old record of 60, baseball insisted an asterisk be placed
next to Maris’s 61 in the official record books, since his season
was longer and he had a few more games than Ruth. If that record
was considered tainted, then how should we look at Big Mac’s and
Bonds’ records? Forget the asterisk, put a little needle next to
theirs.
All of this makes Babe Ruth’s accomplishments that much more
impressive. The Babe didn’t use enhancing stimulants. Hell, most
everything he reportedly ingested — mass quantities of hot dogs
and liquor, for instance — undoubtedly limited his performance.
Who knows how great he would have been had he lived a clean life?
And if he had taken the juice? The Lord only knows, but it’s safe
to guess he would have clubbed a lot more than 714 home runs.
For now it appears that juicing up is so widespread that
steroidgate will be the major league equivalent of the
congressional check-kiting scandal. The defense will be that since
so many do it, it’s not really that bad.
Ken Caminiti has taken a lot of heat from fellow players for
disclosing the game’s dirty little secret. Just yesterday Caminiti
disavowed his comments, taking refuge in the time-worn claim that
his remarks were taken out of context. It’s hard to tell, however,
how one could misconstrue this quote: “It’s no secret what’s going
on in baseball. At least half the guys are using steroids.”
Baseball was long a game that the average guy could relate to,
largely because the players looked like him. One didn’t need to be
a physical oddity to succeed, as in football or basketball.
But that’s changed. Now baseball players look like professional
bodybuilders. It’s only a matter of time before the trainers and
clubhouse guys who tape players’ ankles also find themselves oiling
up their preening charges.
