A prediction: 2007 will not be remembered as the year baseball
finally came clean about its steroid problem. It will merely be
remembered as the year our schizophrenia about baseball’s steroid
problem reached its pinnacle.
Former Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell’s report took the
cloud of disapproval that had settled over the heads of a few less
careful individuals and dispersed it in all directions, naming 86
big leaguers who had been accused — some on strong evidence, some
on the slenderest hearsay — of using performance-enhancing
substances.
“The list” rapidly became a monolithic, undifferentiated object.
It seemed reporters and fans had been capable of understanding and
denouncing individual “bad guys” when there was evidence against
only a few, but were incapable of intelligent handling of an
itemized mass indictment that was almost immediately confirmed as
being partly true by several of the named players. (It has even
persuaded some obscure bit players who had been left off the list
to come forward and confess, as if through some neurotic wish to
appear on history’s stage next to greats like Roger Clemens and
Miguel Tejada.)
Mitchell has been accused by some of engaging in “McCarthyism”
for “naming names” in his report. This is somewhat curious, since
Mitchell himself had no special power to compel anyone’s testimony.
Nearly every ballplayer he sought to interview refused to
cooperate. His report is no more and no less than a work of
investigative journalism, and he would indeed be in line for a
Pulitzer right now if he had been a mere journalist.
Naming names and presenting evidence in detail is exactly the
opposite of Joseph McCarthy’s usual procedure. The main respect in
which the whole episode resembles McCarthy’s pursuit of communists
is that the fifth estate is doing most of the essential
reputation-blackening work, lumping together the potentially
blameless objects of rumor with those who, like Clemens, are facing
documented evidence of guilt against which their rhetorical defense
is incomplete and unconvincing.
But of course McCarthy was closer to being right about the
degree of Soviet penetration of government institutions than many
of his critics, and this is another thing the two former senators
have in common. Mitchell has offered unrebutted evidence of the
culture of secrecy and apathy that allowed performance-enhancing
drugs (PEDs) to flourish in baseball, despite the knowledge of
managers and owners. By itself, the players’ refusal to cooperate
with Mitchell is telling.
MITCHELL HAS ALSO changed our understanding of illicit performance
enhancement in other ways. He has shown what the early results of
formal steroid testing suggested: that the use of PEDs has been as
common amongst pitchers as it is amongst batters, and that many
users were marginal role-players merely seeking to hold on to
big-league jobs or fight the effects of age.
That finding should ultimately silence claims that the drugs
have been responsible for a one-sided explosion in offense, and
dispel self-satisfied claims that they have been confined to the
lockers of a few heavy-hitting superstars. Nor will we be sowing
the record books with asterisks, unless we want the actual
accounting of events to be washed away in a sea of them.
Few of those named in the report ever broke any specific rule of
baseball, and some can even produce legally legitimate
prescriptions for the substances they were taking. The sport did
not introduce serious randomized screening for performance
enhancers until 2004.
Some writers responding to the Mitchell Report have been lauding
the National Football League as a moral exemplar for introducing
steroid tests in 1989. Yet the NFL’s tests have caught fewer than
two players a year after an initial purge, have rarely managed to
bust so much as a quality starter (let alone a superstar), and have
evidently done nothing to delay an age of fast, superhuman
300-pound grotesques on the offensive and defensive lines.
One would have to be awfully starry-eyed to believe that the
drug culture is healthier in football than in baseball, yet
baseball is attacked for being slow to follow football’s lead. No
one has praised baseball for imposing what are now tougher steroid
penalties that the NFL’s, and no one seems to hold much of a grudge
against NFL greats like Shawne Merriman who make the mistake of
getting caught.
Weirder still, most of the blame for baseball’s belated policy
response tends to fall on baseball commissioner Bud Selig, even
though the real difference between the schemes of competitive
stewardship in the two supreme American sports is that football,
for reasons resulting entirely from its talent structure, managed
to domesticate its players’ union much more effectively in the
1980s.
The 1987 NFL strike and the use of replacement players in
nationally televised games, which broke the back of the NFLPA, was
at the time considered one of the most ignominious events in the
history of professional sport. Yet the NFL continues to reap the
benefit from that single act of titanic arrogance, and the fans
play along unthinkingly.
A CLEAR DOUBLE standard is at work, and it doesn’t have much to do
with any sort of sensible doctrine about human health or drug
abuse. As the Baltimore Sun’s Peter Schmuck wisely
observed, it seems that “We treat baseball players like knights and
football players like gladiators.”
The real truth is that our fear of steroids in baseball has
little to do with our care for baseball players as such. The most
important reason baseball remains special to Americans, although it
is less popular in every way than football, is that the players are
still generally human-scaled and physiologically diverse. (And
after Jackie Robinson, the game’s racial diversity has become
crucial to its mythic status, too.)
Baseball has room for the tall and the short, the thin and the
fat, the fast and the slow. Those guys out there are still
recognizably us, performing perfected versions of the feats we
ourselves once might have achieved at a sandlot or public park.
It doesn’t offend us too much to think of the monsters who play
football making themselves more monstrous, but when a baseball
player takes steroids we feel more like we had been swindled by a
neighbor or a relative.
