December 14, 2007--Fanaticism XCIX: The Roids of Summer

Inspired by Popeye the Sailorman, kids of my generation learned that to become powerful and potent, all we needed to do (which wasn’t easy because we hated it) was eat our spinach.

In a typical Popeye cartoon, the little sailor would find himself or his girlfriend Olive Oil, in a perilous situation, threatened by the lumbering but massive Bluto. Weighing 372 pound, standing 6’ 8”, the black-bearded villain was always about to squash Popeye like a bug until somehow our hero managed to get his hands on a can of spinach, down it, and within seconds see his forearms swell to four times their normal size. And with this newly acquired strength he would free Olive Oil from captivity, or worse, and punch out their tormentor.

So, we learned, if we too wanted to be big and strong and defend feminine virtue, like Popeye, we needed to eat nutritiously and play by the rules. Not only would we then be able to fend off neighborhood bullies, but we would also develop the muscles needed to succeed in football and basketball an especially baseball.

Doesn’t this now sound like an innocent idyll?

Not only do we today have an initial list of current and former Major League baseball players who cheated by bulking up on steroids and Human Growth Hormones (see linked “NY Times” article), but not so between the lines we are learning more about the unspoken pact between the team owners and the players’ union to keep all of this hidden because it was in everyone’s economic interest to see these athletes transformed by drugs into versions of androids. A Bluto-like Barry Bonds thus could break all season and lifetime home run records by launching titanic blasts beyond the stands out into San Francisco Bay.

And thus the fans would fill the stands, pay ten bucks for a hotdog and beer, and go wild as Barry Bonds with his size 10 head circled the bases. Just as the suckers do at professional wrestling matches when their living versions of cartoon characters, pumped up by drugs, slams a villainous opponent to the mat. But at least at the WWF “matches” there are few pretenses with many of the pro wrestlers even dressing up in comic book costumes.

Anyone paying the slightest attention has known that Barry Bonds, Jason Giambi, Sammy Sosa, and Mark McGuire in recent years have doubled in size; and others who really paid attention suspected that Roger Clemens and Gary Sheffield were most likely cheating. But what also jumps out from the so-called Mitchell Report is the number of third-tier players who were also shooting up. The likes of Bobby Estella, Ryan Jorgensen, and Chad Allen. Look them up and you will find that they had undistinguished careers. In their cases, the Roids most likely made it possible for them to barely make a team in The Bigs, thus saving them from languishing in the minors.

Back in the day when cartoons were still cartoons, players were effectively chattel, bought and sold as such by a cadre of merciless owners who paid them such a pittance that during the off season they had to take straight jobs as automobile or insurance salesmen. The one time my father bought a new, as opposed to a used car, the salesman was Carl Furillo, the Brooklyn Dodgers brilliant and reliable right fielder. This was clearly not a good or fair system since the players did not share in the bounty they were producing.

Unaware of this exploitation, we kids in our innocence worshiped these players as men of extraordinary achievement. It was enough to become, sort of, disenchanted when we learned that one of our heroes got into a brawl at a nightclub or had a reputation for chasing skirts or having one-too-many. It would have been quite another thing to think that the reason Duke Snider could belt them over the right field fence and out onto Bedford Avenue was because between games his personal trainer was shooting steroids into his ass.