Mark McGwire: How Do We Talk About the Past?
January 17, 2009 by Josh Deitch · 17 Comments
Mark McGwire did not make the Hall of Fame, and did not come here to talk about the past. Should we?
When I arrived in St. Louis to attend college in 2001, Mark McGwire had reached the end of the line. Hobbled by an uncertain back and balky knees, McGwire played in just 97 games over the course of 2001. The year before, he had only appeared in 89 games. Our single season homerun king, who had become as necessary as oxygen to us in the summer of 1998, had been relegated to the spot start and a pinch hitter’s role. However, his presence still permeated Busch Stadium. Big Mac Land, a section of seats deep in the left field bleachers, where many of his titanic blasts used to land, remained a happy and honored landmark. When he stepped into the batter’s box, no matter how rare an occasion it became, an energy unlike any I had felt ran through the baseball-watching populace. Here was our hero. Three years earlier, this top heavy, gentle giant of a man had become a modern day Aeneas. He had thrown the withering and aging game of baseball on his back and dragged it from the wreckage of Troy. It didn’t matter that at age 37, he now struggled mightily and was a mere fraction of the hitter we remembered. Every time McGwire’s bat traveled along its customary path from right shoulder to left, we flashed back to 1998. We pictured that low line drive just clearing the left field fence in early September; that jubilant man almost missing first base as he began his 62nd trip around the bases that season; his son being lifted high in the air in celebration; the fist pounds; the fireworks; the hugs. In that batter’s box, he became Paul Bunyan, a modern American Legend. We loved him. We thanked him. We respected him.
Eight years later, McGwire and his 583 career homeruns have been prohibited from Cooperstown for the second straight year. His record shattering season of 70 homers, followed by 65 in 1999, languish in baseball limbo. I don’t necessarily think the voters are wrong. Like it or not, McGwire, Sammy Sosa, Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, and Rafael Palmeiro—to a lesser extent—will be held accountable for the steroid era. By now, we’ve all seen the footage: Palmeiro’s defiant finger wagging at congress, Sosa’s loss of facility with the English language, and McGwire’s desire to not talk about the past. But in baseball, more than any other sport, the past is always present. The traditions of our bygone years make up the game we know today. Whether we talk about a rotund and bombastic young man capturing the imagination of the nation; an immigrant and fisherman’s son becoming one of the greatest hitters of all time; or a well-educated, soft spoken, lion-hearted black man opening the eyes of white America; history holds a central position in baseball. It’s why the word Cooperstown has become a venerated concoction of syllables. The mere mention of the town evokes a cocktail of wistful longing and unrestrained enthusiasm in old men and young boys alike. Without our history, where would our game be?
That’s the ultimate conundrum of the steroid era. In the years between 1996 and 2006, players accomplished feats that we never thought could be achieved. And yet, contrary to all our years of customarily raising up our heroes, we cannot honor these exploits or the people that performed them. To do so would be an acknowledgement of cheating, an admission of guilt that baseball, a game once undeniably stitched to the fabric of American life, had drifted so far from its tether to our culture that it no longer recognized the drug trafficking laws of the United States.
McGwire didn’t make the Hall of Fame for a second straight year, garnering only 22% of the vote. Though the image of one of his monstrous homeruns sailing into the deepest recess of the night stirred my heart, my head would not allow me to vote for him in the Seamheads HOF Poll . McGwire’s name did not appear on my virtual ballot, not because I consider him a villain that must be shunned from the annals of history, but because his actions have made me doubt my memories. Now, when I look back on the glee and the pure joy of September 8, 1998, uncertainty creeps into my mind. How do I react to this knowing what I now know? Time has not been kind to the career of Mark McGwire.
President Ford pardoned Nixon. McGwire will eventually make the Hall of Fame. He has to. The Hall of Fame celebrates the history of baseball. At its most basic level, history is a story. How do you tell the story of baseball without the Homerun Chase of ’98? However, it will be quite some time before that plaque hangs on the walls of greatness. Before that happens, we need to come to terms with the fact that there will always be ambiguity and insecurity when we look back on this era of baseball history. That type of compromise takes time. Right now, though it goes against the very fibers of our baseball loving souls, we should not talk about the past, but stride hopefully into the future.
The condemnation of players who used steroids, or are suspected of doing so, comes from people who are ignorant of baseball’s past and unable to distinguish between health and ethical issues.
There is probably no period in baseball history when players have not cheated, and to mention just one because of its direct relevance to the 1990s, during the 1960s it was and is common knowledge that a large percentage of major leaguers popped pills such as amphetamines in order to be able to endure the long season. Not only is it known from testimony of people like Bouton, but it has been admitted by players such as Willie Mays. And if the rumor hounds of today cast suspicion on all recent players, as disgusting as that sort of thinking is, then there is no reason to exclude suspicion of every 1960s player, including Aaron, the Robinsons, Clemente and all the others.
Additionally, by its very nature the use of steroids or drugs is fundamentally a health issue not a moral one. The laws that outlaw them, and the social condemnation that accompanies them, fail to distinguish their use from true ethical lapses, and the history of drug use has tainted them for many irrational and tawdry reasons with the mark of sin, but they are no such thing.
Leaving aside the very dubious evidence that steroid use really improved performance, the players neither cheated in any meaningful sense nor did they violate any rules in any meaningful sense. Labeling them cheaters and proceeding on arguments from that point is wrong-headed and makes reasonable discussion of the issue practically impossible.
Performance enhancers are less visible, mostly due to the player’s union finally realizing how damaging they were, but they sure haven’t gone away. If we’re going to forgive and forget with McGwire and his ilk, doesn’t that send the message that it will be worth it in the long run to cheat? The difference between being an accomplished ballplayer and an HOFer is huge, so there’s plenty of incentive to find better and less detectable ways to cheat. No sir, I don’t like it. Soiling the record books with chemically enhanced stats cheapens the game and should be grounds for permanent outsider status when it comes to a plaque.
Using steroids was not cheating, and if it was then we need to eliminate Willie Mays from the HOF since he is an admitted performance enhancer user. No record was soiled and the only cheapening has been done by sanctimonious prigs who condemn players for doing what players have always done.
There is no need to forgive McGwire or any of his peers. Some day we may need a measure of generosity to forgive the accusers, but I doubt we ever should.
Unfortunately, the nature of professional sports is to stretch the rules as far as they go in order to create some sort of advantage. As a middle school teacher and coach that constantly preaches sportsmanship that kind of boils my potatoes, as a fan it makes sense. Why wouldn’t you push your body to the limit and beyond to get paid? No, using steroids before the rules and regulations were implemented was not cheating, but it most certainly was against the law. As public figures and supposed role models (a part McGwire relished) the act of breaking the law is still ethically wrong.
We don’t consider people like Mays and Aaron PED users, because time, nostalgia, and glory have a huge impact on our sensibilities. I suspect eventually our memories and the numbers of McGwire will win out, but it’s going to take time.
Finally, Bob, steroid and drug use are absolutely an ethical as well as health issue. Watch season 4 of the Wire and tell me ethics don’t play a part. By the end of the Steroid Era, baseball as an organization became complicit and complacent to the point that it passively encouraged its employees and all future employees (the 16 year old high school student trying to get a scholarship to Rice) to break federal law in order to compete. Isn’t that the core of ethics? The fact that congress had to step in and force baseball into strict regulations suggests that the business had strayed into an ethical and legal gray area, and had separated itself from the laws of the land.
The ethical issue you talk about is not drug use per se, but the violation or encouragement of violation of laws regarding drug use. There is a huge difference, since the point is that US drug laws treat drugs as if they are ethical lapses rather than health problems. (We need not consider the contradictory messages presented by advertising of course, another part of the lunacy in our discussion of drugs.) It is that confusion in the laws that is the fundamental problem at the root of our reaction to the players. (And I think an historical tracing of those laws would discover some rather unsavory reasons that the health and ethical issue got confused.)
I agree that it is unethical for organizations to encourage impressionable and vulnerable young people to risk their health. And I would like public figures such as athletes to live healthy lives as role models, although I do not think that is a fair requirement so much as a fond hope. And of course even the slightest historical perspective should disabuse us of the notion that most or even many athletes do any such thing. But again, to the extent there is blame, that is upon the management of baseball, not the players, and perhaps in the media that was so complicit for so long.
The fact that many athletes violated federal laws is also somewhat misleading. First, the laws themselves in regard to medications are somewhat byzantine and often irrational. The line between legal and illegal is not always as clear or obvious as some make it out to be. After all, there are steroids in all sorts of legal, even over the counter, products. Second, there are all sorts of lawbreaking and not all are equally weighty. Many athletes and public figures have violated DUI laws, something I consider far more serious than steroid use, but we easily forgive or overlook that. I would hazard a guess that most of us have broken speed limits, fudged on taxes, and perhaps done other illegal things but do not consider ourselves miscreants.
What has happened is that an hysteria has been whipped up over pretended outrage at players using PEDs which has led to witchhunts and blanket condemnations. Politicians gladly jumped in to hog headlines with lachrymose (and idiotic) paeans to the purity of the game and management used the opportunity to undermine the reputation of the players and their union. Ovine fans were herded into believing that sacred records were polluted, that the great baseball they had witnessed was illegitimate and that they should heap scorn on the greats of their generation. It has been a disgusting show.
Finally, while you may be right about the reasons that the Mays generation has eluded condemnation, there is no justification for treating Bonds and his generation so callously and harshly and not according the exact same scorn to that of Mays and his generation.
Many of your points make sense, and I hear them, but like it or not there will always be a public that decries steroid users as cheaters. I’m not going to go into the logistics of the legality and illegality of certain drugs, simply because it’s irrelevant to the argument. Players weren’t using PEDs as some form of social protest, they were using them to get better and get paid…a lot.
There is no question that our society tends to raise athletes up to the point that they are sometimes above the law. No case is a better example than that of Orlando Pace, who while driving under the influence killed a woman and was pulled over for DUI only a few months later. Nevertheless, he played for the Rams throughout this entire process. However, call it naive or idiotic, I believe the general public still chooses to believe that the games we watch and the players we cheer are clean; that they have reached the pique of human performance and stand as bastions of what we could be, if we just applied ourselves.
Ultimately, I would argue that Bonds and his generation have heaped the scorn (as you put it) on themselves. Had McGwire and his cronies not acted like hypocrites in front of a national audience, had Bonds ever shown an ounce of contrition, had Clemens not acted like a pigheaded moron, the public might have left them alone. Players like Jason Giambi and Andy Pettitte have continued their careers without much uproar because they shut up and put their heads down. McGwire, Bonds, and friends have stood up and made themselves targets. Had they simply faded into the background noise, we might not still have this argument today.
“Leaving aside the very dubious evidence that steroid use really improved performance…”
No, of course steroids never improved performance. We just lived through a magical era in which a bunch of once-in-a-generation players appeared all at once, to blow the home run records out of reach, forever. Then the wave broke, and we will never see such athletic magnificence again. How wonderful to contemplate such a special, completely coincidental explosion of pure athleticism in baseball. And to have it all spoiled by the sheep who would believe that abusing anabolic steroids would make people stronger, more resilient and capable of greatly exceeding their natural limits, slandering the all time greatest baseball power hitters.How dare they judge what they cannot understand.
I do feel sorry for all the athletes who risked adverse health consequences for no benefit! I’m surprised they didn’t realize the steroids were doing nothing but blowing up their jaws and skulls and shrinking their testes. Weird guys, pro athletes!
You know, there were some players who didn’t use, didn’t think it right to use, knew it was dishonest and cheating, made a mockery of the game and its records. I like those guys. I appreciate those guys. Their actions and their beliefs count for something. The opinions of baseball fans do count for something. I’m not sure if you took notice or not, but at the time the baseball steroid craze was in full swing, the Olympics and many other sports bodies were in aggressive programs to detect and curtail the use of the substances in question. Because they were destructive and made records silly, because the effects on performance were dramatic. The Player’s union and baseball’s reluctance to take it on kept baseball in a bubble of its own.
To pass off fan’s revulsion at the steroid era’s fake heroes as some kind of irrational, hypocritical hysteria is disingenuous. To be contemptuous of them is arrogant. There are many points of view on the subject. If you want to equate greenies and steroids go ahead. Your opinions are just that, opinoins. What’s not meaningful to you may be very meaningful to someone else. To deny that is porcine.
Thinly veiled sarcasm, pragmatic arguments, backhanded insults…I like you, Cary
There have been numerous studies trying to connect steroid use to performance, and they are at best inconclusive. Nobody denies that steroids have a physical effect on users, but there is a difference between adding muscle and playing the game better. And the skills needed to play baseball are different from those required in other sports such as track and field.
As a matter of fact, there is quite a bit of evidence that during the period there were differences both in the balls and bats being used which may have had more impact on performance than steroids. And there is substantial evidence that many who took steroids made no progress at all in their performance. There is also plenty of historical evidence of players suddenly and dramatically improving their performance (Yaz, Klu, even Musial and many others) as well as dramatic shifts in stats from one era to another.
I do not doubt that many players were averse to steroids and that the very fact that they were used surreptitiously indicates a general acknowledgment that they were not fully acceptable. But that does not make them either effective (many people take all sorts of medications that do them no good whatsoever) or more shameful than smoking marijuana or engaging in any other illegal act that one would not publicly acknowledge but that we know is commonplace.
I am contemptuous of many, not all, fans who reject these athletes. By and large, I consider them silly hypocrites and self-righteous fools being herded into their views by others. I freely admit there are others who have thought the issue through carefully and come to different conclusions than I have, and I recognize that there are arguments that make some sense to them. But when I see any argument that equates PED use with unethical behavior I have no problem labeling it stupid.
As for the public outcry, I agree absolutely that it exists. But I see no reason for thoughtful people to accept it, to be part of it or to pass it by without stating its utter stupidity. As for McGwire and others heaping scorn on themselves, when people are accused of things that deserve no condemnation, reactions will differ. McGwire acted in the only way an honorable person could act. He simply refused to be drawn into the sideshow that Congress sought to promote. He would not feed the rumor mill, that great sickening maw. The others acted differently. Other than McGwire’s way there is no graceful way to deal with such filth, and we see that few recognize the nobility of his approach. If anyone acted shamefully it was Pettitte and his ilk who hoped to avoid repercussions by publicly repenting and trying to distance themselves from their friends who chose another course.
By the way, I think your point about them not taking the steroids as a protest is perfectly legitimate. But I do not think it entirely relevant either. They were not heroes for trying to improve their performance chemically. They were simply doing what ballplayers have always done, seeking an edge that sometimes took them perilously close to the edge of what their society found acceptable. And it should be noted that steroid use was accompanied, at least by the great players, with rigorous workout and nutritional regimens. There were no magic potions as even a cursory view of the list of users should amply demonstrate.
Incidentally, if you really want to deal with cheaters, look a bit more carefully at Ruth and Mantle and others who cheated their bosses and fans by not staying in shape, by appearing in games hung over or even drunk. They acted to limit their performance, and that was real cheating.
Gee Bob, for someone who wants to hug cheaters, why so sore at those who shun them?
“McGwire acted in the only way an honorable person could act.”
That’s about the funniest thing I’ve ever read, except I don’t think you were going for humor. If you have nothing to be ashamed about, tell the truth. If you don’t want to implicate others, fine. He damn well knew what he did to himself.
The saddest thing about that, was that Canseco was the most truthful of them all. So better start a crusade to get him into the hall before McGwire and Sosa, Palmeiro and Bonds and Clemens.
I mean, honesty counts for something, right?
OK, clearly the best we’re going to hope for is an impasse. But to continue to contend that illegal drug use is not immoral or unethical is silly. Though there is a lot of ambiguity in moral and ethical debates (would you kill one to save a thousand? steal to save a starving child) this one’s pretty clear. This isn’t an example of an athlete stretching him or herself to the limit, it’s about circumventing that limit. Do bigger muscles lead to homeruns? No, otherwise Arnold Schwarzenegger would be in the Hall of Fame and not the governor of California. Do they turn 399 foot fly balls into 402 ft homeruns? Umm yeah. How about allowing a 38 year old man to gain 20 pounds of muscle in the period of life where one’s muscle mass is clinically expected to decrease? Umm yeah again.
Though Ruth and Mantle may not have maximized their talent (although, I think they did pretty well), they didn’t break the law doing so. Steroid use is against the law, most athletic bodies outlaw it because of not only the harmful health effects, but also because of the uneven playing field it creates. It’s why the WWE is not a sport but “sports entertainment.” Speaking of, please do tell the relatives of Chris Benoit, Eddie Guerrero, the British Bulldog, and all the others that steroid use is not a moral issue.
John, you are right. I was not attempting humor. Your argument is similar to the one that says if you had nothing to fear why did you take the 5th amendment. When you face obviously hostile interogators, intent on attacking you (and when you are not yourself an experienced public orator), there is no way to respond to them except to refuse. What is he to do? I may be wrong, but as I remember he had taken Andro which was legal at the time, to speed up his healing. So should he do a phony mea culpa? Should he throw himself on the mercy of the mob? The only response to these clowns was to refuse to give them the satisfaction of an answer. Had they been willing to discuss the future he was apparently ready to cooperate. Obviously their intent was to humiliate by reviewing the past which had no useful purpose in that forum.
You may recall that when the Andro issue was publicized, he made a direct plea to youngsters not to use it and stopped doing it himself. There was no reason to prolong the matter before Congress.
Josh, you are correct that we are at an impasse. But I reiterate that just because a law criminalizes something, it does not mean the thing itself is unethical. Law have at times criminalized miscegenation, atheism, christianity, abortion, blasphemy, selling beer on Sundays, whistling at girls in the street and much more. You may think some of those acts are unethical, but the fact they were illegal is not what made them so.
So what is left? That violating the law (we will ignore civil disobedience) is unethical. I agree, in most cases. But there are degrees, and on the continuum of offenses from the least to murder or worse, injuring oneself by taking banned substances ranks very low. I would certainly rank DUI as far worse, for example, but we do not refuse enshrinement to violators in that case.
As for the level playing field, again, I agree there is a case. But at the time the customary and accepted practice was to ignore, even to encourage steroid use. This may not exonerate the athletes, but it certainly makes the case against them very weak. We know that cheating in the very real sense of taking unfair advantages such as scuffing balls, corking bats et al were also common practice for many HOFers, and they were certainly breaking baseball rules that others might be less willing to do.
I should not have raised the Mantle/Ruth issue as it is of another sort, and as you correctly point out, their actions did not advance their careers. But to make the matter clear, they broke many laws from consorting with prostitutes to drunk driving and public inebriation to sex with minors and more. That did not help them on the field; in fact in some case it did the opposite which is why they really were cheaters in a much fuller sense that they were acting in a way that made them less competitive.
There is simply no way to apply some arbitrary standard like suspicion of steroid use to McGwire when we overlook the rampant amphetamine use of an earlier era. There is no question that the pills made for an uneven playing field, that players performed better because of them, that they were illegal and that they are harmful to one’s health. The fact that public opinion does not recognize that does not mean that we have to be complicit in ignoring the injustice of such blindness.
A final point. I am sure a sound philosophical argument could be made that drug use does have a moral dimension by considering the social costs, the harm it does to oneself (an argument I tend to discount but not entirely) and other subtle factors. Of course, the same could be said about many perfectly legal activities such as smoking and overeating. I am not willing or equipped to consider those issues, certainly not here. But on balance, drug policy in general has misplaced its emphasis trying to condemn users and abusers rather than treating the issue rationally. As a person who has never used any illegal drugs and despises them, even the legal ones in many cases, I am appalled at the idiocy of our self-defeating attitude towards them. I have no objection to banning them in sports and penalizing those who violate those bans, but certainly not ex post facto and certainly not with anything more than the stated penalties applied appropriately. I don’t want to hug cheaters, but I want the definition to be honest and the penalty to be served without bias or extraneous fuss.
A lot of words can sometimes be inspiring.
Sometimes though, they are used to try to convince yourself.
If you think that refusing to answer questions enhances McGwire’s credibility, what exactly would detract from it?
He made his money, and at the end of the line, was ashamed of what he had done.
At least he has a conscience, I suppose.
Bob, you remind me of the Pete Rose dead enders. Those who refused to believe the Dowd report. When Pete finally ‘fessed up, the silence from Bill James was deafening.
I’ll expect the same when McGwire does the same, if he ever does.
Rather than use a lot more words, I refer you to this:
http://www.hardballtimes.com/main/shysterball/article/mark-mcgwire-and-integrity/
Note that Craig does not really agree with me, but he has a rational argument. I particularly like some of the comments, far briefer and more pithy than mine, that do support some of what I am saying.
I cannot resist adding one point. Perhaps it is possible in the venue of a Congressional hearing to examine an issue thoughtfully, but given the purposes and personalities, I doubt it. Far more likely is that what comes out of it are sound bites and commentary more fit for a Mike Francessa sports talk show than real discussion.
Who is going to listen to the kind of interchange that we have read here? How could McGwire, even if he was so inclined, explain anything without appearing either self-serving or mendacious?
The point is that the issue is not clear-cut or black and white. It is complex, and public hearings run by publicity hounds do not encourage exploration of complex issues. They seek to simplify and present either-or scenarios. Drugs are bad. Lawbreaking is bad. Steroids are cheating. There is no “but” involved, and anyone seeking to include the “but” is mocked or attacked further as morally ambiguous.
I don’t really know McGwire’s motives or intentions, but he was trapped, not by his own actions but by a situation beyond his control. There was no point in talking about the past, none whatsoever, and in refusing to do so he did right. As noted, it would have been far simpler to say simply that he used steroids, that others did as well, and that he was sorry. That would have been easy and probably beneficial to his reputation, but also cowardly and dishonest, because it would validate the simplistic view of the matter and implicate others.
When the verdict is in, the presumptions established, determined by hysteria not reason, nothing enhances credibility except kow-towing to it, that is by being pusillanimous. Whether he thought it through that way or not, McGwire at least avoided that label from anyone who considers correctly.
I think the worst thing is what we’ll never know and the clouds over some of these players that will never go away. There are good arguments to be made that a statistical surge in home runs is within the mathematical ‘norms’ for such an abnormal, quirky category. There are good arguments to be made about how much steroids would increase a player’s home runs, or not, over what their ‘normal’ production would have been. For my money, the increased weight and muscle mass the effects of steroids gave and the quicker recovery time for closely spaced, intense workouts they enabled made a significant difference in home run numbers
I think I have a rational basis to not be comfortable with the juiced numbers, but I can see the arguments on the other side. What really bugs me is that there was a congressional hearing that really didn’t contemplate any congressional action. It should have been a judicial process, with criminal penalties, so you could invoke your right to avoid self-incrimination or be given immunity from prosecution so that the truth could come out and baseball and society would know what had happened and take a direction based on that knowledge. As it was, the players were being sworn in and pressured to admit to illegal acts, with no protection. They could either do that, which would be crazy and their lawyers were surely telling them not to, or they could lie and be caught in a perjury trap, which congress seems to be determined to try and spring on Clemens. The whole thing was just a sort of show trial, so some congressmen could express their righteous indignation.
I wish to hell there was just one guy who put up the crazy home run numbers who wasn’t a heavy juicer. That would make a lot of the arguments for crediting the numbers to talent and circumstances rather than steroid abuse a lot stronger. But we and the players in the steroid shadow are just stuck with these bad feelings all around, and no way to know what we really should make of it all.
The only thing I’m absolutely sure of is that stringent random testing and cutting edge lab battles to keep up with the newest PEs and masking agents have to be gospel and verse of sports policy. Hopefully with MLB and the other sports bodies leading the way instead of leaving it to clueless lawmakers.
Cary, amen, brother…Amen
I will add an “amen brother” too. While we continue to disagree over emphasis, I don’t see the words “guilt” or “cheaters” or “soiling records” in this post (whether you intend that to mean something or not), and I do see the acknowledgment that the issue is multi-faceted and subject to varying interpretations rather than statements of blanket condemnation and certainties. So amen brother.
Where we disagree, I think, is on sensitivities. Given my view of the history (as opposed to the mythology) of baseball, I have no problem with the records that emerged in the 1990s and later. They are entirely valid in my view, and can be as likely (probably far more likely) credited to changes in the style of play and the competition created by it, as well as changes in bats, balls, umpire strike zone judgments, 12 month training programs and much more as they can be to chemicals. Leaving aside the issue of law-breaking for a moment (and I consider those violations as little more than misdemeanors anyway), the purported improvements brought about by steroids are no different from improvements wrought by wearing eyeglasses, getting TJ surgery, improved training and diet regimens and other advances in preparing athletes to compete. I appreciate that others are more sensitive on this issue than I am, and so long as they keep the tone civil and rational, I have no argument with it.
On the other hand, there have been other developments that do raise my dander and that I am appalled about.
The treading on the 4th amendment rights in demanding random drug testing caused hardly a ripple. It may be that the protection does not apply in this case or that it is legitimate to interpret the protection so that it can be ignored, but for it to be trod underfoot with hardly a murmur in the rush to solve a problem that has people whipped into hysteria is frightening. Over a game, an entire class of people are to be cavalierly deprived of rights with no demur. Even if it is the right thing to do, shouldn’t there be some controversy, some acknowledgment that wrong or right the union at least has a legitimate concern? One should be left aghast at such insensitivity to so important a question. Hello, does anyone care? Is anyone home?
I was not happy with the bullying of the union into renegotiating on this issue, but now that it has been done, I accept the agreement and think players should be punished according to it, but without calumny added to the penalty. I also agree with those critics who say the union was out of touch with its own membership and should have been more forthright in addressing the issue rather than putting up barriers. But that is essentially a tactical question. Left alone, the matter might indeed have lingered longer and the status of the game might have been further compromised in the public eye, so I cannot entirely criticize the pressure exerted, but again, it aroused little dissent, and that is dangerous.
The leaking of sealed grand jury testimony was also passed over with hardly a ripple of disapproval. In the hunger for more gossip, for names to bandy about, the public was perfectly happy to have the law broken in this case. Has there been any investigation into these leaks, by the way? I really do not know. I find it appalling that the public clamor for dirt should so easily trump the rule of law. In fact the entire publicity attending the steroid era, the attacking of reputations on the flimsiest of evidence I find nauseating.
And the violation of the vow that the initial test results would be kept secret was also ignored by the media and public to a large extent. This violation was not only unethical, but impractical as it gives players cause to doubt the word of management on any issue and more reason to be obdurate in opposing improvements in detection.
I am far more sensitive to these lapses of judgment, ethics and law than to the supposed “soiling” of records (that may have been soiled in some way themselves) or the violations of irrational laws that do more harm than good or the breaking of baseball rules (which are often broken in other cases also) that had no enforcement provisions and that were not just ignored but even whose violation was encouraged by the very institutions charged with applying them.
So amen brother. It appears we are finally talking to each other instead of at each other.