The Black Sox scandal didn’t occur in a vacuum. It was the culmination of more than a decade of league officials and club owners not dealing seriously enough with gambling influence in the game. While the brazenness of throwing the 1919 World Series may have been shocking, gamblers paying ballplayers to lay down should have surprised no one who’d been paying attention.
History has a way of repeating itself. Trumpeting every new steroids story as a revelation helps ESPN fill its otherwise vapid Web site during the offseason. But, at least since the leak of Jason Giambi’s grand jury testimony late last year — which was noteworthy only in that the horse’s mouth confirmed what was already suspected — nothing else particularly unexpected has been said. Not the pillow talk of Barry Bonds’ mistress. Not the ramblings of Jose Canseco. And certainly not the admission of Padres GM Kevin Towers that management had a pretty good idea what was going on.
More ink has been spilled on this issue than any other in baseball in recent years, and yet you hardly ever see somebody get to precisely what it is that makes steroids so destructive to the game. Yes, steroid use by players is unlawful and damaging to their health. And, yes, steroid use is also cheating. (This is to say nothing of the terrible example they set for youth and amateur athletes.)
But it’s the combination of these factors in particular that makes them so threatening. There are lots of ways to cheat in baseball — doctoring the ball, corking a bat, using contrivances to steal signs. While some of these things will get a player suspended if caught, they don?t put pressure on anyone to take his health into his own hands or break the law to compete. Steroids do.
If steroids represented no health or legal risk, who would care whether anyone or everyone used them? Any player could take advantage of them — just like better nutrition, training and health care — to enhance his performance. But telling clean players that the only way to level the playing field with the juicing players is to break the law and risk their health goes beyond the pale of expectations of competition. These are ballplayers, not gladiators.
But by ignoring the problem, the message that Major League Baseball and, even more nefariously, the Players Association have sent during all the years this scandal was brewing is essentially, if you want to do this, we’re not going to try very hard to catch you, and if you don?t want to do this, you’re simply going to have to live with the competitive disadvantage.
As craven as baseball officials have been in facing this problem, they at least have the excuse that the Players Association has refused to budge on this matter. Executive Director Don Fehr and the rest of the union were willing to sell out the clean players rather than subject the juicing players to rigorous testing. What a way to represent all of your members.
But, then again, the union is supposed to belong to the rank-and-file. While some presumably clean players have spoken up in favor of testing to clear the names of the innocent, the bottom line is that not enough of them were willing to challenge their own union to implement a real testing policy. And it would’ve taken an incredibly brave man — someone on par with Jackie Robinson’s courage — to take that stand and subject his fellow players to potential exposure.
So there’s plenty of blame to spread around — baseball officials, Don Fehr and the Players Association, the clean players who remained relatively silent — and, of course, the steroid-users themselves. But those players will end up with perhaps a more dire punishment in the diminishment of their accomplishments and legends.
Barry Bonds has never been a particularly likeable guy, but at least his feats spoke for themselves, posting the greatest four-year offensive performance in baseball history as an old man. Now that all remains in question. Bonds? great seasons in his mid-20s, when he won three MVPs in four years, were presumably clean.
But his historic seasons in his late 30s, when he won four MVPs in a row, are illusory. We’ll never know when precisely Bonds used the clear and the cream and what Bonds could’ve done in those seasons without them — yet all of that uncertainty is Bonds’ own fault. It has nothing to do with his personal qualities or that Bonds is black and Babe Ruth was white.
Maybe steroids do nothing for hand-eye coordination, which Bonds has in prodigious quantity, and maybe additional muscle mass reduces flexibility and hence hampers bat speed. (It’s sure strange that anyone used them, though, given these alleged shortcomings.) Perhaps the biggest thing the steroids did was keep Bonds less hobbled by the bumps, bruises, pulls and tears of old age. Time is what does in even the greatest ballplayers, and if all Bonds’ cheating did was delay that, he still had an unfair advantage over the clean players.
Of course, this deprives all of us as fans. More than any other sport, baseball stands on its history and its records. Those records, as set in recent years, now have a mental asterisk attached to them in our minds, regardless of whether any notation is ever placed in a record book.
At least Roger Maris’ advantage of having an additional eight games to chase the Babe was not of his own doing. And it’s easy enough to see that Maris had 58 home runs at the time the Yankees played their 154th game. Unraveling what the steroids did for Bonds and others is not so easily done. We’ve seen records that we?re unsure should really have been set.
This brings us back to the baseball officials. While the Players Association was an impediment to stronger monitoring, the bottom line is that the power game was drawing remarkable attention and huge crowds to baseball. What incentive was there to limit it, except maybe the chance that one day the scandal would break? But by now the checks have been cashed.
What really made any reform impossible is the joke that the owners played in installing one of their own as commissioner, first on an interim and then on a permanent basis. This ended in 1992 a 72-year-old reform that resulted in 1920 from the Black Sox scandal.
Major League owners, looking to restore the appearance of integrity to the game, instituted a commissioner to exercise vast powers over the game. While selected and employed by the owners, the commissioner was separate and apart from them. He could exercise powers in the best interests of baseball.
While the labor wars of the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s inevitably brought the owners and commissioner closer together, Selig’s appointment ended any misapprehension that the commissioner is anything more than an advocate for the owners, not for baseball. Surely that’s the way the Players’ Association sees things.
And without a truly independent commissioner to face the problem of steroids and cleanse them from the game with real testing and enforcement — even the newly instituted policy allows for many extra chances, when a zero-tolerance policy is what’s called for — baseball has pissed away the credibility of many of the most heroic performances of its most prosperous decade.