Fans Sickened by the Steroid Era Shouldn’t Complain Now

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.