Fans Sickened by the
Steroid Era Shouldn’t Complain Now
Sports
code: Baseball
Source: New York times
Date: 9/10/14
Midway
through the fourth inning of a National League division series game Monday, a
stranger walked over to where I was watching the broadcast in a restaurant. The
game between the San Francisco Giants and the Washington Nationals was
scoreless, and yet another hitter had just had a failed at-bat.
“Can
anyone hit anymore?” the
man complained.
An innocent
question, asked at the wrong time.
I’m not sure
what it was about what the man had said that got me to preaching. It was
probably seven years of pent-up frustration over the self-righteous, fan-fueled
pursuit of steroid users by baseball’s commissioner,Bud
Selig.
“You can’t
have it both ways,” I said, pointing to the television screen as another batter
grounded out. “You can’t tell baseball to get rid of steroids, rage again at
so-called steroid cheats and then complain when you get this.”
The Giants
went on to lose Monday, 4-1, before wrapping up the series a day later — with a 3-2
win that also featured very little offense. On Saturday, the Giants and the Nationals had played a
6-hour-23-minute game in which the teams combined to score three runs.
There are
legitimate points to be made about other factors contributing to the demise of
hitting: defensive shifts, for instance, and middle-relief pitchers who throw
100 miles an hour. These days there are also endless conferences on the mound
to make pitching changes or discuss an ever-widening array of strategies, which
means a game that is already thick with strategy has become so dense — and
narcissistic — that even a scoreless game can become a marathon.
But it is
also clear that the rise of pitchers has coincided with the apparent decline in
the use of performance-enhancing and performance-sustaining drugs like steroids
and amphetamines. Some hitters, for sure, have suffered.
I don’t
advocate the use of steroids, though in a society that uses drugs to improve
performance in virtually every aspect of our lives, I’m open to the legalized,
supervised and highly regulated use of certain P.E.D.s in sports.
In any event,
my message to fans like the man who approached me Monday and lamented
baseball’s lack of scoring is: Don’t complain. This is what you wanted. You
chase performance-enhancers out of baseball, you probably chase away some of
the hits.
Of course,
there are those who contend that diminished offense means baseball is merely
going through another phase. And I get the evolutionary arguments.
In 1968, Bob
Gibson was king of the pitcher’s mound, the feared face of pitching dominance
that was drastically limiting scoring To counter that trend, baseball lowered
the mound. Then, 35 years later, Barry Bondsbecame one of the most dominant offensive forces
baseball has known. He defined an era in which offense reigned and attendance
grew. But it was Bonds who also became the face of steroid use, and the federal
government and Major League Baseball pursued him relentlessly. The government
eventually won a
conviction against him for obstruction of justice.
Baseball —
Selig, in particular — publicly flogged Bonds, baseball’s home run king, and
Selig later went after Alex Rodriguez, who seemed poised to surpass Bonds
someday. Over the past two seasons, the sport has handed out a good number of
suspensions for violations of the game’s substance-abuse policy. Rodriguez was
ultimately barred for a year.
Selig,
concerned about his legacy, has essentially declared that performance-enhancing
drugs are now dead, buried and gone from baseball, although it’s clear that he
has probably been overstating things.
It’s also
worth noting that baseball’s pursuit and demonization of Bonds, at some levels,
was personal for Selig. The commissioner is a Milwaukee native and a former
owner of the Brewers who never hid his affection for Hank Aaron from his days
with the Braves in Wisconsin. Selig watched as Aaron, an African-American star,
withstood hostility as he chased, and eventually passed, Babe Ruth’s home run
mark in the early 1970s.
So it could
not make Selig happy that decades later it was Bonds, of all people, a player
linked to performance-enhancers, who was bearing down on Aaron’s record.
But just as
Aaron was a signpost of an era — an African-American surpassing a coveted
cultural milestone — Bonds was an unhappy signpost of one, too: an era
involving drugs that everyone from owners to executives to players helped
create.
Now that era
has waned, if not disappeared. But so, too, it would seem, has some of the
ability to score.
That gets
back to the original question: What do fans want? A replay of the recent juiced
era in which tape-measure home runs become the norm and a lot of players hit a
lot of balls over the fence, or the suffocating pitching that now predominates?
The circus,
no doubt, was more enjoyable — after all, fans in every sport want to see
scoring. Which means baseball’s conundrum is how to present a clean game — and
a quicker one, too, for that matter — that can attract more young fans.
Nine-inning games that last nearly four hours are not the answer.
As to
whether baseball is a sounder game now than it was when balls were flying out
of the park not long ago — that’s a matter of taste. Hitters (some of them
amped) and offense, or pitchers and defense: Take your pick. But attendance
figures don’t lie, and baseball slipped this season for the second straight
year.
A good
pitching duel now and then is fine. But not every day. And not when — from
April to September, and now into October — the games take so long, whether or
not there is any offense to liven up the proceedings.
In the end,
the fans who clamored to get performance-enhancing drugs out of the game can’t
exactly complain with the way things are now.
You can’t
have it both ways.
