The other night, while watching playoff basketball with a friend, we got onto the topic of baseball players. He, like many people, is a great admirer of Manny Ramirez, one of the most talented right-handed hitters ever to play the game.
When I mentioned as much, my friend’s voice dropped. “Yeah, too bad he’s tainted.”
In case you’ve been living under a rock for the past 15 years, he was referring to “juicing,” or the use of performance enhancing drugs, such as anabolic steroids. Since the mid-to-late 1980’s such use has been scrutinized closely in baseball. There are all kinds of theories as to why men have taken to “cheating” – from economics to peer pressure to “keeping up with the Joneses.”
My first awareness of steroids in baseball came in 1989, when I first saw Lenny Dykstra, one of my favorite Mets from the scrappy, dominant 1986 World Champion squad, in a Philadelphia Phillies uniform. He didn’t look like the same guy. Okay, so he’d been working out, but something just wasn’t right.
Then came the “Bash Brothers” in Oakland -- Canseco and McGwire. Both were big men, but their muscles ballooned almost comically in the time they were teammates. By this time, if you didn’t smell a rat, there was something wrong with you.
But there were two events in contemporary major league baseball – both of which involved the long ball, the homerun, once the most basic display of unbridled power in the sport. First there was the cartoonish back and forth of McGwire and Sammy Sosa, as they surpassed Roger Maris’s single-season homerun record in a tit-for-tat battle that boosted baseball’s ratings and made fawning sycophants of once-respected sports commentators.
And of course the coup de gras was when Barry Bonds broke Hank Aaron’s total homerun record with number 756 in August of 2007. He has since been indicted for perjury and has had an asterisk branded onto his record-setting baseball that sits in the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York.
As a father of two boys, all of this makes me think back to my own childhood. I remember watching the news as a ten year old that Hank Aaron, one of my favorite players, had beaten Babe Ruth’s lifetime record for home runs, by hitting his 715th. My brother and I had a fairly extensive baseball card collection . Our team was the Mets, of course, but we loved looking at all the men on those cards, reading their statistics on the back, while chewing on gum so stale it tasted like cardboard. There was no greater joy than sprawling on the floor and looking at our cards, trading for doubles and triples. Our father endorsed our enthusiasm with his own, telling us tales of his own favorites from the Brooklyn Dodgers, Pee Wee Reese, Don Newcombe, Roy Campanella and Jackie Robinson.
Today, thanks to all the doping and asterisks, I will find it hard to encourage the kind of love of the game my brother and I, and our father before us, had. Thanks to the poor judgment of a number of men, the game itself has been tainted. Don’t get me wrong; I know the men I looked up to were by no means perfect. But they reached their milestones, set their records and did their jobs on the strength they had, not the strength they acquired by shooting foreign substances into their veins.
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