March 30, 2006--The House That Steroids Built
The baseball season begins this weekend and still the subject on most people's minds is not Pedro's toe or Soriano's play in left field or Randy Johnson's Love Child. It is all very much about Barry Bonds, steroids, and his now discredited assault on Babe Ruth's and Hank Aaron's home run records. Even the Sports Illustrated article and the book from which it was excerpted, The World of Shadows, were both timed to coincide with the opening of the season (see NY Times book review below).As a lifelong baseball fan I can't resist weighing in. Not to condemn Bonds and McGwire and Sosa and Sheffield and Giambi but rather to point out just a few of the many hypocrisies that this sorry episode exposes. Allow me to innumerate a few.
Since so much of this is about home run records—not just the Babe’s and Aaron’s lifetime numbers but McGwire’s and then Bond’s one-season records--many fans and sportswriters are up in arms because they see using steroids to build bulk and bat speed as a from of cheating.
But cheating in baseball takes many forms and has gone on forever. For example, what would you call the Yankee organization’s building a baseball field specifically designed to accommodate Babe Ruth’s batting style? Yankee Stadium is called The House that Ruth Built because it was configured to have a very short right field fence to make it easier for the Babe, who batted left-handed, to hit home runs into the fabled Short Porch.
And what about teams that “doctor” their infields to have bunted balls roll foul if they are playing opponents stocked with good bunters or, if the home team has excellent bunters, tip the infield foul lines in so as to keep balls in play?
If you have fast runners on your team who can beat out balls hit to infielders, well let the grass grow a little longer or water it excessively to slow the balls down to give your guys a better chance to beat out hits.
And of course once Major League Baseball figured out that younger fans who did not know or appreciate the subtleties of well pitched games that might be 2 to 1 in the seventh inning, boring, that these fans preferred high-scoring games, to pander to their tastes MLB “livened up” the baseball to make them jump off the bat faster. And teams were allowed to purchase bats that were made of especially hard wood, extra kiln-dried, also to make balls leap off the bat and deeper into the stands—“Tape-Measure Jobs.”
What do you call allowing baseball gloves to morph in size from the tiny ones the old-time players used to the virtual baskets modern-day center fielders and first baseman have that allow them to catch almost anything hit or thrown in their vicinity?
Since teams are in truth businesses with annual payrolls reaching beyond $200 million per year they have to fill stadium seats that cost $50 to $100 each, sell hot dogs that cost $4.50 each, and attract fans to watch on them TV.
Since Baseball is among other things competing for audiences with the World Wrestling Federation which consistently garners the highest ratings on Cable TV, they have been turning a blind eye to the Barry Bondses who are so bulked up with the same steroids that Hulk Hogan uses that they are indistinguishable from each other in appearance and equally phony.
Since so much of this is about home run records—not just the Babe’s and Aaron’s lifetime numbers but McGwire’s and then Bond’s one-season records--many fans and sportswriters are up in arms because they see using steroids to build bulk and bat speed as a from of cheating.
But cheating in baseball takes many forms and has gone on forever. For example, what would you call the Yankee organization’s building a baseball field specifically designed to accommodate Babe Ruth’s batting style? Yankee Stadium is called The House that Ruth Built because it was configured to have a very short right field fence to make it easier for the Babe, who batted left-handed, to hit home runs into the fabled Short Porch.
And what about teams that “doctor” their infields to have bunted balls roll foul if they are playing opponents stocked with good bunters or, if the home team has excellent bunters, tip the infield foul lines in so as to keep balls in play?
If you have fast runners on your team who can beat out balls hit to infielders, well let the grass grow a little longer or water it excessively to slow the balls down to give your guys a better chance to beat out hits.
And of course once Major League Baseball figured out that younger fans who did not know or appreciate the subtleties of well pitched games that might be 2 to 1 in the seventh inning, boring, that these fans preferred high-scoring games, to pander to their tastes MLB “livened up” the baseball to make them jump off the bat faster. And teams were allowed to purchase bats that were made of especially hard wood, extra kiln-dried, also to make balls leap off the bat and deeper into the stands—“Tape-Measure Jobs.”
What do you call allowing baseball gloves to morph in size from the tiny ones the old-time players used to the virtual baskets modern-day center fielders and first baseman have that allow them to catch almost anything hit or thrown in their vicinity?
Since teams are in truth businesses with annual payrolls reaching beyond $200 million per year they have to fill stadium seats that cost $50 to $100 each, sell hot dogs that cost $4.50 each, and attract fans to watch on them TV.
Since Baseball is among other things competing for audiences with the World Wrestling Federation which consistently garners the highest ratings on Cable TV, they have been turning a blind eye to the Barry Bondses who are so bulked up with the same steroids that Hulk Hogan uses that they are indistinguishable from each other in appearance and equally phony.
posted by Steven Zwerling at
10:20 AM
1 Comments:
You raise a few issues that I've hardly seen discussed and I applaud you for that. Here's my overall feeling on this subject. I truly believe that steroids has been around for a while and baseball knew about it - they just didn't want to bury the hatchet too soon because they knew fans, especially young kids, flocked to the ballpark to see sultans of swat. Ken Caminiti, who was the focus of a Sports Illustrated story several years ago, did not officially leak steroid use. Neither did Jose Canseco. But once steroids was made public, baseball needed to address it. Unlike the other issues you bring up, such as how Yankees stadium was designed for Babe Ruth, steroids can cause serious health problems, which most likely killed Caminiti. In fact, steroids have trickled down into amateur sports where we've seen young athletes commit suicide due to juicing up. That's really the most important issue in my opinion.
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