I've been doing a lot of thinking while following Barry Bond’s record home run chase. Amidst the allegations of his past steroid use and people clamoring for his record to be blemished with an asterix, I gave a significant amount of reflection about how I feel about the morality of it all. Trying my best to put my Yay Area loyalty aside, I came to this conclusion. I'm perfectly fine with it. Why? Because the second you put on a baseball uniform, you are taught, if not encouraged, to cheat. Here are some examples all of which occurred before I was 11.
My first year of little league and we're doing drills to learn to slide properly. I was taught that a proper slide also includes kicking an infielder's glove in hopes that the ball pops out.
I was also taught that if you’re a catcher, and you get a pitch that just misses the strike zone, move your glove as you catch it so you might trick an umpire into calling it a strike. My teacher for that one was Johnny Bench, host of the Baseball Bunch, a nationally syndicated TV show.
The movie the Bad News Bears showed us all as kids that putting Vaseline under your cap and rubbing it on the baseball can give even a pre-pubescent Tatum O'Neal a wicked breaking ball.
This is all stuff we learned during the Little League years and it's all technically cheating. This was all in the pursuit of a kid’s game for fun. Now throw in the millions of dollars and the fame that comes with success at the professional level and combine it with the cheating that the culture of baseball precipitates and you bring us to where we are today. The game of baseball will always have its cheaters. It's up to the institution of baseball itself to take care of that problem. The baseball powers that be turned a blind eye to steroids for a generation so I feel the disgust should go towards them, not the players. So when something like this comes up in life, it all goes back to a cheesy-ass trucker hat a friend of mine once wore. It read, "Don't hate the Playa, Hate the Game"
Wednesday, August 08, 2007
Why I'm okay with Barry Bonds
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4 comments:
word Paj, word
Pajo, you obviously spent too much time across the bay from the City of Dope.
In this circumstance, Barry is not competing with other players in "the steroid era" he's competing with history and all of the players that came before and will come after him.
Obviously, there are many players in this current generation that are using or have used performance enhancing drugs. In that context, if Barry's use allowed him and his team to compete and win more effectively against these other "cheaters", then I would have no problem with that.
But, Barry's achievement is not that he anchored his team to victory over scores of other juiced up players. It's that he hit more lifetime homers that Ruth, Mays, and Aaron. Players that did not have the unnatural, and illegal, advantage that Bond's has had. Additionally, he is in the process of setting what will likely be an impossibly high mark for all future players. Further tainting what is, arguably, the greatest achievement in all of sports.
Oh yeah, I hate baseball, Wolfman's got Nards, and Vikramjit wants his soap back.
I can understand that point of view, but I don't buy "competeing with history" when the sport of baseball itself has been designed to have hitting records dwarfed anyway. The lowered pitching mound, stadiums with shorter fences, domed stadiums, allegedly juiced baseballs, expansion which dilutes the pitching talent pool..all of these have played much bigger factors in the increase of offensive total than steroids ever could.
In the last 20 years baseball, by design, has proven that all that matters is we have higher scoring games to keep the fans happy and attendance up, history be damned.
You have realize Juano that history takes care of itself sometimes, especially in sports. For example, take Rafael Palmeiro vs. Reggie Jackson. A slugger from this generation and a slugger from the generation before. For his career, Palmeiro had a .288 Avg 569 HRs and 1835 RBI in a 20 yr career. Reggie Jackson had an .262 Avg. 563 HRs and 1702 RBI over a 21 year career. Even before the steroid allegations of Palmeiro, who stood out in the fan's eyes as the greater slugger?
While I'm okay with Bonds breaking the record, I don't think that in anyway diminishes what Ruth, Mays, and Aaron accomplished. Where Bonds stands, I think history will sort that out for itself.
One last thing: ARRRRGHHH Ya little kids!
Pajo and Juano,
If you normalize Bond's achievement by arguing that baseball has promoted higher scores through lower mounds, shorter porches, and a storied history of cheating, then we have to accept that any behavior or artificial enhancement not prohibited is allowed. In my opinion, the crime committed is that Barry has climbed the highest mountain in sports with an oxygen tank on his back which gives him a pervasive advantage because he had equipment that not all players had (even if they had access to cream/clear, not everyone used it). This is outside the context of "cheating" in baseball. There is a clear difference in my mind between stealing a sign during a single game and cheating every at bat because your body is loaded with beef-roids. Framing pitches doesn't always work, but if you are loaded up before games, every at bat is impacted by that enhancement. I see a clear difference.
If he is not proven a cheat legally, then he will sit along side Lance Armstrong under the spotlight of "how could one individual rule a sport so dominantly for a period of time when others didn't rise to the same level?" In cycling, others were caught, just as others have been found to have used steroids in baseball. If steroids work, then others would have blown by Barry, just as other cyclists would have blown by Lance, unless they were also using something to enhance performance. In Game of Shadows, Barry made the decision to start steroids when he saw the attention sosa and McGuire received during the chase. It was at that point that Barry's numbers jumped drastically and his head became a weather balloon.
In my mind, it will be worse for baseball if Barry is not outed. I agree with Juan that the record will be unreachable without enhancement which has a far reaching negative ripple effect for generations to come as they look up to the numbers and have no natural way to reach them.
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