Drugs and Baseball
Well it’s been a couple days now and the fallout continues. In case you really don’t keep up with sports or the news, I’ll tell you what all the hubub is about — some Major League Baseball players used steroids. Some report named about 70 players (a few current, many former) who “had contact” with “growth-enhancing” drugs. I’m shocked. Just shocked, I tell you. Mostly I’m shocked that it’s only 70 players.
Do you know how many people are associated with Major League Baseball? There’s 30 teams at the Major League level. Each team has a 25-man roster. That’s 750 players. Each team also has minor league teams — usually a AAA-team, a AA-team, a single-A team, and a Rookie team. Many teams have more than one team at some of these levels. Each of these teams has at least a 25-man roster (some have many more). That’s at least 3,750 players of Major League Baseball — not including all the staff, coaches, managers, and administrative people. With 70 players out of 3,720, that’s less than TWO percent of all players that “have contact” with “performance-enhancing” drugs.
That sure doesn’t seem like very many to me.
More importantly, I really don’t get it. Who cares? I don’t think anyone, other than the pundits, really cares. Sure, there’s non-stop reporting and interviewing going on now. But I really don’t think the average fan cares. I know I don’t. Then again, I’m also amazed that apparently there’s a lot of people who actually thought there weren’t drugs in baseball.
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It matters because unlike other sports which have undergone rules changes, baseball’s history is relevant. That is, the home runs Hank Aaron and Babe Ruth hit required the same effort as the ones Barry Bonds hit. While not many people know who currently holds the lifetime passing statistice records in football, almost everyone knows who holds the home run record. Other baseball records are similar. They are sacred within the game.
By cheating, these players have destroyed all of baseball history. A vast swath of records from this era are now suspect, making a mess of the lore of the game. The game gave them their livelihoods and they chose to ruin in for their own selfish ends.
I have to agree with you. A mere 70 out of all those porfessional ball players is quite a small number. And I really don’t care that Bonds or Clemens or Pettite used the stuff. HGH may help you get stronger but it doesn’t make it any easier to put a stick of wood on a ball traveling at 85-95 miles and hour and moving all over the place. Nor does it help you hit the corners of the strike zone consistantly.
Oh, I don’t disagree with you at all on that. Yes, the history is destroyed. I just didn’t think there were all that many people that didn’t already know that steroids were in the game. I figured, rightly by news reports I’m reading now, that most people just assumed everyone was already doing steroids.
Then again, the report only linked steroids to less than 2% of players — a smaller percentage if you make the determination only by including active players and not retired players.
The more I think about it, the more I think I need to get all the names from that report and just pull out the ones that are current players and see what that percentage is. My guess is that it will be less than one percent then.
Oh, one other thing:
At one time the spit ball was perfectly legal. Does that diminish the records of the pitchers of that day and age?
There was once something called the “dead ball era” when the ball itself was “built” differently. Does that bring into question the records of that day and age? Or those froom the days when the mound height was very loosely regulated? Or from the days of the bean ball that kept hitters honest (scared but honest) in the batters box? Or pre designated hitter (*spit*) rule?
Forget history, the leaders of the game have screwed it more than 2% of the players being juiced.
You’ve got that right (about the leaders)! I loved the beanball. Not being hit by it, of course, but the retaliation and strategy there was great!