Last week, the story that will not go away jumped back into the headlines.  With news that the names of two high-profile sluggers who had failed “confidential” drug testing performed by Major League Baseball were leaked to the press, the term steroids was again a front page story.

For some reason, it became a fresh story again when it turned out that the Red Sox’ Manny Ramirez and David Ortiz were steroid abusers, at least back in 2003.  This comes months after it was revealed that Alex Rodriguez used the juice which was after the Mitchell Report tossed suspicion on every player who took the field in the late ’90′s and first half of this decade, which came after the Senate hearings that accused every major slugger of the era of using.

After the jump, I will get all Jim Traber on the topic in a way that would make Jim Traber’s head explode and probably be well received by some players with Oklahoma ties like Ryan Franklin (from Spiro who was suspended for a failed drug test in 2005), Juan Gonzalez (who played for the Oklahoma City 89ers and was outed by Jose Canseco), and Sammy Sosa (a Tulsa Driller alum who forgot how to speak English when in subpeoned by the Senate).

When I was younger, I watched the movie Eight Men Out which dramatized the “Black Sox Scandal” that ended with eight players from the Chicago White Sox receiving lifetime bans for “fixing” the 1919 World Series to assist gamblers.  The movie was pretty clear that the players were simply greedy people with no one’s interest but their own in mind.  Upon reading the book on which the story was based, though, I learned there was so much more to the story.

 In the first part of the twentieth century, baseball did not have ”the national pasttime” mystique that became associated with the game after the Great Depression.  It was a struggling sport trying to gain market share in a country that was not yet truly cohesive.  What they realized is that people who bet on the games were more likely to follow it closely and spend money to attend the games.  Because of that fact, the powers that be who ran the game silently encouraged relationships with big time gamblers.

These eight guys made Charles Comiskey millions and eventually took the fall so he could make millions more

To say that the 1919 World Series marked the point where this situation reached the predestined conclusion would be a fallacy.  Games had been thrown for a long time and the team owners had no qualms about the truth of that fact.  The games popularity was rapidly increasing and the players pocketing some extra money from the guys making their franchises a cash cow was the least of ownership’s concern.  What the 1919 series did mark was the point where the general public started to care.

In the end, it was not the people who profitted from the fix who took the hit.  In fact, the players wound up being stiffed when the person who made the arrangements was short changed by the gambling big wigs he though would bankroll him.  The owners who took home huge profits thanks to paying the players a pittance and riding the wave that the underworld created were just anonymous non-entities to the general public who felt betrayed that the sport they had come to love was crooked.  While the owners initially attempted to protect the players in hopes of quieting the uproar, with the intention of returning to the status quo, management eventually punished the players as a scape goat.

Fast forward 79  years and history repeated.  In the wake of the player’s strike that cancelled the 1994 World Series, the sport was reeling.  Fans were sick of the greed that had come to symbolize the game and took their money to other avenues of entertainment.  By the Summer of ’98, the league had figured out how to bring them back.  It involved re-focusing the greed that had upset the fans into a team effort that would excite the fans.

McGwire and Sosa saved the game while destroying it.

In 1998, the sport was saved by the home run race between Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa.  Since Roger Maris barely eclipsed Babe Ruth’s 34 year old record of sixty home runs in one season by bashing 61 in 1961, another 37 years had passed without a single player threatening the mark.  During one summer, both McGwire and Sosa breezed past the previous standard.  While they were going for the once untouchable milestone, the media followed every single at bat and dominated the news cycles with speculation over which player would break the record first and who would have the biggest number by year’s end.  The answer was “Big Mac” in both cases.

This was the beginning of the end of the goodwill.  In the run-up to the big event, a reporter discovered that McGwire had a cannister of creatine (a substance banned by the NFL) in his locker…right out there for anyone to spot.  It was of no significance to this reporter that creatine was a workout supplement that any schmoe could purchase over the counter at any GNC.  This was evidence that Mark McGwire was a cheater.

As the story began to swell out of control the accusation that was bandied about a lot is that the players who used performance enhancing drugs cheated.  To this day that term is misused a lot.  To cheat, one has to break a rule, and until 2005 no such rule prohibiting the use of any performance enhancing drug.  A player could be suspended or even banned from the game for using a drug like cocaine, but the rules were intentionally silent when it came to something like steroids.

There was a reason.  Fans love to watch the long ball.  It was not rocket science to notice that the league that used to see the league leader hit somewhere around thirty bombs and now saw defensive specialists driving that many balls out of the park was in the state of drastic change.  For its part, the league was happy to disingenuously entertain the possibility that the cause was something palatable to the public.

Acceptable boogeymen were new stadiums, advances in weight lifting techniques, high altitude (in the case of Colorado), expansion watering down the pitching (but somehow exploding the number of players capable of hitting home runs), and my favorite, the “juiced ball theory.”  Well, juice was involved, but it was the juice transforming baseball players into herculean meatheads that was truly driving the increased production in the sport’s most exciting product.

This is the forgotten part of the equation.  Ownership profitted from the players getting bigger by any means necessary and had a front row seat to what was going on.  How did they manage the situation?  They paid exorbitant salaries to the players most willing to sacrifice their bodies to bring fans into the stands and made zero effort to curtail the expanding use of performance enhancing drugs.  Let me repeat that:  zero effort.

While salary caps and revenue sharing were contentious points of discussion during labor negotiations, but none, including those in 2002–four years after McGwire was first labeled a cheater for his creatine use and the year following Barry Bonds’ massive forehead smashing past McGwire’s mark–mentioned drug testing.  Just like in 1919, management waited until public outcry required them to self-police before making any efforts to do so…and just like 1919, it was the players who took the bullet.

By now, I am only surprised if I learn that a player never took steroids, and truthfully the general populace is in the same situation as me.  When a players name gets linked to a shady pharmacist, no one questions whether the information is reliable, but if a player denies ever taking PEDs (assuming the player is not on one’s favorite team) everyone scoffs.  But my question remains, why are the players taking the heat in this situation?  Without rules outlining what is and is not acceptable, why should guys who took substances that are now banned (thanks only to government intervention) guilty ex post facto?

The fan is now expecting these people, who at the time were only asked to hit home runs or strike people out, to anticipate what the public would and would not accept and wager their multi-million dollar careers on every other player having the same scruples.  I mean, who is to say what constitutes a performance enhancing drug in those circumstances?  One person could be perfectly satisfied with a player taking Human Growth Hormone to rehabilitate an injury while another could see Tommy John surgery to repair a torn labrum as an unfair tilting of the scales against players with perfectly healthy shoulder ligaments.  And the argument that taking substances banned in the U.S. as a standard forgets that McGwire was crucified for taking an over the counter supplement or that a good portion of the players are from other countries with laxer standards.

For the bulk of fans now, though, none of those caveats matter.  Their trust has been broken and they want to punish those who the people with the public face.  Whether that means shutting them out of the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, NY, placing an asterisk next to their record, or simply referring to the player derisively, the fan wants retribution.

Of course, the options available are unsatisfactory and also improper.  The Hall of Fame is a museum dedicated to documenting the history of the game.  Locking players out for moral reasons is a news-speak way of white washing the dark era of baseball.  Besides, the Hall would basically have to shut down enshrinement for the next couple of decades until Albert Pujols is eligible and retroactively remove some players.

Think about it:  every player who had a significant portion of their career come between the years of 1987 (when home runs spiked without explanation) and 2005 (when penalties were instituted for PED violations) are suspect.  For instance, should Cal Ripken (enshrined in 2007) be above suspiscion?  He played 2,632 consecutive games–he never needed a pick-me-up when his hamstring was tight or he had the flu to make it through the game?  (Note:  If he were reading this article, this is the point where Jim Traber would spontaneously combust.)

Do not get me wrong, I have no issue with Ripken being a Hall of Famer.  He is a member of the 3,000 hit club, has more than 400 home runs, played in 17 consecutive all-star games, and the run up to him breaking Lou Gehrig’s durability record kept the game afloat post-strike.  Then again, you can say similar things about Mark McGwire who was named to the All-Century Team before his retirment and now has been passed over for election to Cooperstown three times.

Who? That's right.

Everyone, and I mean everyone who played baseball during that era is suspect.  Don’t believe me?  Read “The Mitchell Report”.  It was not just the big boppers who were injecting with horse steroids to assist in muscle creation.  For every big name, like Roger Clemens, there were two F.P. Santangelo’s.  The guys on the fringe were looking for the advantage that would keep them in the league just as the players who were legends wanted to make their star that much brighter.

So how do we proceed?  For one, we take the advice McGwire has been villified for giving to congress and move on.  With testing now mandatory and harsh penalties in place, the fans can have reasonable confidence that today’s players are succeeding based on their natural abilities, therefore the future is as we wish the past were.  As for grading out the players of the time, we do it like every other time and let history do the judging. 

The players should be measured by the yardstick of their peers–who we have established were all suspects.  So, the players who rose above the chaff are still deserving of having their greatness recognized.  Just like Frank “Home Run” Baker was recognized as a great power hitter of the deadball era (despite the fact that he only hit 96 bombs over a sixteen year career), the players of the steroid era will be graded by the benchmarks of the time.  That is also why the asterisk is worthless.  Does pushing shift-8 after typing 73 do anything?  It certainly does not change the fact that Barry Bonds, for better or worse, hit that many balls out of the park in one 162 game schedule.

Then, the history books can add the context that future generations can use to publicly flog these guys.

In the meantime, I respect the decision of people who have completely given up on baseball more than those who want to segregate the past twenty years to pretend it never happened.  That punishes the right people:  everyone involved with the sport.

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