When spring training started, so did the emails, asking if I planned to write about steroids in baseball. I didn’t plan to; I didn’t want to. Like many baseball fans, I didn’t want to think about it any more than necessary, and I didn’t want to open that can of worms (again). I don’t have the medical expertise, I don’t have the statistical background — I’ve always written about baseball impressionistically, so what could I add to the discussion that every other Angell manqué in the op ed pages hadn’t already?

Then, three things happened.

Thing the first: Bean bought me Jose Canseco’s song of himself/steroids exposé Juiced for my birthday. Up until that point, I had successfully avoided reading it, because while I wanted to know what it contained, I did not want to pay the cover price for the privilege of finding out. So much for that excuse.

Thing the second: BSD emailed me the cover of Sports Illustrated‘s baseball preview issue (and, just as a quick sidebar, shut up, cover of Sports Illustrated‘s baseball preview issue. I love Jeter and Damon, but 1) way to pick the two least likely candidates to get into it with the rivalry, 2) way to cobble together so-called shit-talking quotes from each of them that remind me of Smithers’s edit of Mr. Burns for his screensaver, and 3) way to once again prioritize the rivalry as a “news” “story” at the expense of legitimate stories and stars elsewhere in baseball. At least give Damon the cover to himself. I would say “put Ortiz on the cover,” but I don’t think Papi would fit on the cover. Hee). I went out in search of said issue, and I had to hit every newsstand, bodega, and drugstore on a mile’s worth of Fifth Ave. before I could find a copy. Most places only had the swimsuit issue in the SI rack; a couple still had the Gary Smith “Broken Dreams” cover-story issue about steroids in baseball from a week or so ago, which I ended up buying.

Thing the third: The 2005 season began last night, with a Yanks/Sox game during which Jason Giambi got a standing ovation from the Stadium fans, and the Yes Network posted a graphic regarding the MLB’s penalties for steroid use.

So, here we are.

About Juiced, I will say that at least Canseco has a good ghostwriter. The book is a quick, easy read, especially since so much of it is impossible to take seriously. Categorizing Mark McGwire as a “skinny kid” his rookie year, to give you just one amusing example, is absurd. I remember the guy when he came up, and — as big as he got in ’98? No. But “skinny”? Six-five, two-twenty is not “skinny” where I come from.

And then you’ve got the whining about how, “in 1988, no one wanted a Cuban to be the best baseball player in the world.” In the what now? If I recall correctly, 1987 saw Al Campanis make his horribly ill-considered remarks about African-American athletes on Nightline, so it’s not like racism in baseball wasn’t or isn’t an ongoing issue. But it’s probably not outside the realm of possibility that “no one” wanted “a self-aggrandizing horse’s ass” to be the best baseball player in the world, either. At the time, I liked Canseco. Terrible hair, and he looked like a cartoon, but eminently watchable.

The main problem I have with Juiced, though, is Canseco’s basic premise, namely that steroids rock! Everyone should use them! Steroids make you stronger and faster! Steroids add excitement to baseball! If you don’t agree, you just don’t get it! Steroids, woo!

What he actually says: “[T]he performance enhancement that can come with responsible steroid use is nothing to be dismissed. It’s an opportunity, not a danger. And those who are trying to make an issue of it are speaking from ignorance.” He also advises “the smart athlete” to stay away from alcohol and illegal drugs and use “a moderate amount of steroids, administered properly.” (When he busts on Giambi, which he does repeatedly, it’s not for using steroids, or for any denials he issued; it’s for using the wrong steroids and going about it incorrectly.)

And I agree with Canseco that “steroid use is nothing to be dismissed,” but everything else in the statement is, in my opinion, perverse. Yes, it’s an opportunity: to gain an unfair advantage. To cheat. And as such, it is a clear danger, to the game.

You wanted my opinion. This is my opinion. Major league baseball needs to ban steroids, immediately and completely, and to institute extremely harsh deterrent penalties that it then scrupulously enforces, because steroid use is cheating.

This is where my opinion comes from. Steroid use differs from, say, Lasik eye surgery, or the Tommy John procedure, or vitamin shakes, or weight-lifting, or anything else baseball players didn’t do back in the day to gain an edge, because steroid use is not something the layperson would also use. This is, to my mind, the litmus test: if, in normal life, you would not take the drug or undergo the procedure or engage in an analogous behavior, it does not belong in baseball. Laypeople take short courses of steroids as an anti-inflammatory; laypeople have vision correction surgery; laypeople drink protein smoothies for better nutrition and to diet; laypeople “watch video of their at-bats” (it’s just called “research” or “studying”).

Laypeople do not stick needles into their asses so that they can bicycle to work faster, or hoist more garbage into the truck, or “see the file system better.”

The only purpose of steroids is to give the user a size/speed advantage not enjoyed by other players — or, as it’s become clear, to reduce the dis-advantage at which you might find yourself if you don’t use. And it’s clearly unfair.

Of course, you can argue that laypeople don’t use mitts, either, or bats, and they don’t bother fixing their rotator cuffs, so we should ban all of that too, then, but — come on. Use a little common sense. You’ve got the tools necessary to do a given job, and then you’ve got a tool that, while not required, makes you better at a given job than is merited by your actual abilities. I mean, yeah, having a shitload of reference books in the house might give me an advantage over other writers, but I still have to know what to do with those references, to consult them and absorb what they tell me — and any other writer is free to step over to Amazon and pick up the same books. I still have to do the work. A reference book is a tool in the service of that work. But if I do a mind-meld with Toni Morrison and then cough up a Pulitzer-Prize-winning novel, that isn’t fair, because that isn’t a tool. It’s a cheat.

I don’t have much to say on the subject of the dangers of steroids medicinally, because I don’t know enough. I do know that friends of mine who taken steroids are not exactly turning in rave reviews, and that even my vet took Hobey off them after a few months and advised surgery instead because he couldn’t predict the long-term effects; I know that, while he was on steroids, Hobey’s win-to-scuffle ratio went way up. So, from a health standpoint, it doesn’t seem like taking steroids is the greatest idea. Ask Little Joe.

I don’t know what to do about the records either, knowing what we think we know now. I feel like we should asterisk the hell out of them, because we don’t know quite what those stats tell us anymore (and because, if Bonds is going to go into the Hall, and if known spitballer Gaylord Perry is already in, leaving Pete Rose on the outside is going to start to look reeeeeally hypocritical). I don’t think Bonds got a huge advantage from steroids. I think he’s on them for sure — I remember how he looked when he came up, and he didn’t have that big block of a head in the eighties — but he’s still a great player without them, always was. Still, he’s probably getting an extra five home runs a year that he wouldn’t otherwise. And he’s not a young guy, either; I suspect that, without some sort of performance enhancement, he’d have retired by now — his body would have crapped out, and he wouldn’t have put up good enough numbers to justify continuing.

I also think a lot of the brouhaha surrounding Bonds in particular has to do with the fans not wanting records they’ve always thought of as immutable to change. Even if Bonds were a scrawn, they’d think of some nasty shit to put on him to diminish the accomplishment, because Babe Ruth is the premier icon of baseball, and people just don’t want that challenged. Maris went through it, Aaron went through it, Ichiro! had to hear it last year with the Sisler thing — it’s about the fans liking things to stay the same, mostly, to know the same facts they’ve always known, to keep the same heroes. Part of it, too, unfortunately, is that Bonds is a bit of a dick, and I don’t want to think that it’s racism, but part of it probably is about that as well.

But the thing is, the last person to challenge Ruth, the guy who passed him, Henry Aaron, not only had to chase Ruth’s record while receiving constant and disgustingly racist death threats, directed not just at him but also at his family, but he did it from six-one, one-eighty. If you look at the footage of him, he’s not a mite, but he’s not a Sosa, either. He’s just a regular-build guy who can hit a ton, trying to put a few runs on the board and not get shot at. Barry Bonds is an outstanding hitter; he doesn’t have to dodge bullets to get my respect for that, or to make his achievements “count” as much as Aaron’s. But if he’s got a chemical edge that Aaron and Mays and Ruth didn’t? No good. And again, the man is a great player, but if he did juice himself, we’ll never know exactly how great — or how much greatness came from Bonds and how much from the cocktail. I think the vast majority of the greatness is in fact Bonds, because steroids do not create ability out of whole cloth; it’s not like he used to hit a buck eighty.

That isn’t the point. That kind of talent, that kind of achievement, is uncommon, extraordinary — it’s supposed to make us marvel, primarily at its rarity. If it becomes commonplace, as it has in the last ten years, to hit .300, to hit 30 home runs, as a matter of course, those things lose their cachet. They become cheap. All hell broke loose in a Brooklyn bar over a Pat Kelly home run because you got maybe three of them a year. These days, Pat Kelly could probably hit fifth for an American League team. I have a hard time seeing that as a net gain. (Somewhere, Pat Kelly’s all, “…Hey!”)

Do all the home runs we see hit nowadays make the game more exciting? Yes and no. A home run is exciting. A home run sucked me into this game in the first place. And I remember the day McGwire passed Maris — I was in the car, driving back from Boston, and I had another game on but the announcers broke in every time McGwire had an at-bat, just in case, and he put one out of Busch Stadium entirely to break the record, which is not easy, and it was pandemonium on the broadcast, the announcer is yodeling with joy, the Cards fans are losing their shit in the background, and I was grinning so hard my face hurt. I felt kind of bad for the Marises, and strange and dislocated, too, like an era had ended, which in a way it had. But goddamn was that a lot of people screaming. And honking, in neighboring cars on I-87, which was awesome.

That’s the excitement of the game, when something cool happens — anything cool. Sure, a home run is cool, but it’s just as cool to watch when one gets taken away. Godzilla climbing the wall in left last night to take a two-shot away from…Bellhorn, I think? Play of the game. Thrilling catch. But when I came to the game, when the thirty-thirty club was a really small club, when little ball ruled the NL, it was still plenty exciting. When Keith Hernandez hit .301, that was exciting; it was special. We don’t need home runs to love the game, and we really don’t need home runs that we don’t know for sure would have gotten hit without a pop in the thigh. For every fan who came to the game because the All-Star Game home-run derby is better now, you’ve got another who’s turned off by the fact that you don’t know what the stats are telling you.

Nobody seems to know what to do next. Nobody wants to deal with it. The players don’t want to deal with it because it will cost them stats, and some of them might get nicked by the penalties. The owners don’t want to deal with it because they think banishing steroids will mean lower stats, which will mean lower gate receipts — not to mention that if players on their rosters get suspended, they have to go out and get new ones. The commissioner’s office, such as it is, doesn’t want to deal with it because they have to enforce it, and because if they try, the players will strike.

Let them strike. Seriously. Ban steroids from baseball. Make random testing mandatory at all levels of organized ball, and make the penalties severe. Really severe. “Two strikes and you’re out” severe. One positive test, you’re out for the year, with no pay, and if you got busted in August, you have to give your salary to date back to the club, and you have to do national PSAs telling kids not to use steroids and saying your balls shrank, even if they didn’t. Two positives, you’re out forever. No minor-league play; no coaching; that’s it. Learn to type, son, because you’re through.

The current set of penalties is a joke, probably because the players’ union wouldn’t accept anything more stringent, but again — let them strike. Call up the guys from Class D, hold auditions and let the softball leaguers try out, put Luis Sojo back in a jockstrap, send a few women out on the field (it’s worked before) — fuck it. Enough. Baseball has to get serious about getting steroids out of the game and to make it clear that they’ve gotten serious, and that will come with painful consequences at first, but the game has to show that it’s determined to protect its own integrity. And once the fans see that determination, we will stick it out. It doesn’t have to be good baseball. It just has to be real. We aren’t going anywhere.

And if the players see that MLB isn’t fucking around, they won’t go anywhere either. Trust me. Any strike based on the steroid policy would last about a week, tops. Because if MLB is like, all righty then, go ahead and strike, we’ll make do with the Rutgers intramural squad and…that guy, do you think Frank Thomas is just going to wait it out when he could be putting up the rest of his Hall of Fame numbers? Do you think Derek Jeter — who, whatever else you think of him, is clearly not a ‘roid monkey — is going to sit by and let the guys who did use steroids dictate player response and thereby cost him his career? Do you think the 23-year-old utility infielders from the DR who send that money back to their families are going to sit out while Randy Johnson is pitching no-nos against the Intercourse PA Dairy Queen team?

It just won’t happen. If the commissioner showed some sack for once, it wouldn’t even get as far as a work stoppage. They’d do some crabbing about the anti-trust legislation, and some muttering about starting their own league, and then they’d look at history and see that that has literally never worked, and they’d give in. Because this isn’t the reserve clause, where all the players got treated like chattel. The player reps can’t take a moral position here; they don’t have one. They can’t tell management, “Look, everybody’s doing it,” because not everybody is, and if A-Rod isn’t, that’s the end of the discussion. In fact, if the players are smart, they’ll insist on a testing regimen and stiff penalties. It evens the playing field for everyone and makes them look great for suggesting it.

But I don’t care who does it; it’s got to get done. To start with, get an independent commissioner in there, and back him up with an actual independent commission. Selig is not acting in the best interests of the game and never has; find someone else. Next, declare a six-month amnesty, and give everyone a chance to clean out their systems and start fresh. Institute locker checks and bag checks. Refine the tests to make them sharper. And when the six months is up, start throwing the book at people — at everyone, not just mid-market scrubs nobody’s going to make a fuss over except their agents. Sosa comes up positive, he’s out for the year. Giambi comes up positive, he’s out for the year. Pitchers, catchers, MVPs, they come up positive, they’re out for the year. Send a message. Deal with it. Address the problem.

Routing problems that might ruin the game in the future does not itself ruin the game. It strengthens the game. Nobody wanted to deal with the Black Sox, either. It took two years for that shit to come out, even though Christy Mathewson told everyone he could get to listen that he saw something hinky, even though Joe Jackson tried to confess a few days after the Series ended — nobody wanted to hear it. Everybody knew that Hal Chase and Sport Sullivan and dudes like that had a headlock on the game, with the fixing and the cheating and the bootleggers moving the line on injury reports. Everybody knew that gambling and game-throwing had become huge problems. Nobody wanted to deal with it, for the usual reasons — spheres of influence, greedy owners, the problem seemed too big, blah blah. And then one day they had to deal with it. The truth came out, and Kenesaw Mountain Landis had to throw eight guys — big stars, most of them — out of the game forever, and he did it to save baseball. Baseball survived, and it thrived because of the end of the dead ball and the ascendancy of the Babe, but it survived because Landis sent a message about the sanctity of the game as the national pastime, to wit: Honor the rules or get the fuck out.

Baseball must change the rules to explicitly exclude steroids from legal use. It must suspend, then ban, any player caught using steroids; it must test the players rigorously and suspend, then ban, any player refusing to undergo the testing; it must enforce the punishment rigorously. It’s intrusive. It infantilizes the players. I understand that, and I don’t love it, but a few players poisoned the well of trust for everyone, and because they didn’t police it themselves, they’ll just have to live with someone else policing it. Organized baseball is riddled with steroids, evidently, and it needs to come from the top right on down: you cheat, you sit. You can’t make the big show on your own steam, you learn a skill. Asterisks and blood tests for everyone. Honor the rules or get the fuck out.

It’s not the most realistic plan, it’s inflexible, you can no doubt find exceptions, but I think it’s the only way. Half-assing a solution to the problem won’t work; you can’t treat the fans like idiots, and you have to show the game and its history some respect. Baseball is made up of human beings, and human beings make mistakes, but human beings can also achieve great things — it isn’t about preserving Hank Aaron’s record under bulletproof glass for all time. It’s about making sure the record that replaces Hank Aaron’s is a record of genuine ability and endurance, that all the records set from here on out measure talent and fortitude, not shortcuts and needle aim.

Sorry you asked now, ain’tcha?

April 4, 2005

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