It has gotten out of hand. Steroids are ruining baseball. A significant portion of the league’s elite players use a drug that makes them far stronger and faster than they could ever hope to be naturally. In other words, a lot of the best players in baseball are cheating.
In 1996, Mike Piazza was having one of his great years. Piazza is a likely Hall of Famer who was drafted near the bottom as a Tommy Lasorda favor to Piazza’s father. He turned out to be a hard-working natural, winning Rookie of Year and quickly becoming one of the best hitters in baseball. But there was another story in the National League that year: Ken Caminiti. The Padres third-baseman had slightly better offensive numbers than Piazza, but he also contributed on defense as a third baseman, whereas Piazza was a sub-par catcher. So Caminiti won the NL MVP award. Years later, after becoming a joke and never even approaching the productivity he had in his MVP season, he admitted to having used steroids. Ken Caminiti was never a real MVP. He cheated; he stole the award from the best hitting catcher since Johnny Bench.
This was the beginning of the wave. And astonishingly, nobody in baseball wanted to do anything about it. Granted, baseball had just taken the beating of the ’94 strike, and was desperately trying to recover. But for both the league and the players association to turn their heads while players cheat their way to prominence is unforgivable. And now the situation has grown far worse. Even if both the players union and the league wanted to fix the problem (which they don’t), administering random testing at this point would be an admission of guilt.
So why shouldn’t I believe that Mark Prior is juiced? For now, I’ll consider him guilty. And maybe he’ll go on to have a great career and there will be those of us who doubt him even though we can never prove it. But it’s not skeptics like us who are to blame, it’s the players who make a mockery of the sport.
Take Javy Lopez. We all know Javy, a good catcher for the Braves all the way back to 1992. He’s not a 43-home-run hitter. That wasn’t Javy last year. Not counting 2002, when he was hurt and had an especially bad year, the change in his productivity from ’01 to ’03 simply don’t happen to someone in their twelfth season in the majors. His batting average leapt up by 60 points, his slugging percentage by 250, and he hit 50 more RBIs. It was Javy that was in a contract year and wanted to put up big numbers, it’s Javy that’s now getting paid $7 million-per-year, but it was not Javy who hit 43 home runs, more than he hit in his last two healthy seasons combined.
While Lopez is the most laughably obvious example, we all know the list goes on. It’s a real tragedy that the three greatest seasons of any hitter in the history of baseball (Barry Bonds 2001-’03), were almost certainly due in part to steroid use. It’s perhaps even more tragic because Bonds would still be one of the greatest hitters in history without steroids, putting him in a different class from Caminiti, Lopez, Bret Boone, and Jason Giambi. It’s not that I’m concerned that these athletes are endangering their health. I’m not. They’re choosing to take a considerable risk, and being well rewarded when their drugs hit homeruns for them. But it is cheating, and the fact that we know that so many baseball players are users doesn’t make it any less of an offense.
Many Americans probably believe that our Congress has better things to do than oversee sports, but it attests to the irresponsible, incompetent, and unethical behavior of both parties in baseball that this issue has reached Capitol Hill.
Steaming over all of this to my sister the other the night, she calmed me down by reminding me, “What can you expect from a sport that doesn’t have revenue sharing, doesn’t hire African-American and Latino managers despite the racial make-up of the players, doesn’t give money collected in fines to charity, as all other sports do, and slaps the ‘World Series’ label on a set of games played between a $180-million-dollar juggernaut and a $30-million-dollar club.”
I guess I can’t expect much.
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