Baseball Chemistry

For the moralists in baseball world, a group that includes remarkably few fans but almost all sportwriters and pundits, the warm feeling of moral superiority through which they view the steroid brouhaha of the past few years is palpable. They are outraged, and for them there can be no question -- no permissable alternative view -- that anyone involved with the use of steroids has "cheated" and therefore had, forevermore, a deleterious if not ruinous effect on the game.

Actually, though, there are several alternative views.

One of them is held by the fans, who have voted with their feet over the last decade or so with regard to how they feel about the great steroid uprising: They don't care. And for all the right reasons. What they -- we -- intuitively grasp is that although baseball loves its sacred statistics (and stat wonks obsess over them), those statistics don't define baseball's core appeal, which is sitting in the sunshine watching a game of skill undertaken by its most skillful practitioners. The game's the thing, and past transgressions haven't changed that, and can't. I don't think many folks sit in the stands thinking "well, this sucks, because of what McGwire did in 1998." On the contrary, they go to baseball games and enjoy them, as they always have. Speaking of McGwire, who among us didn't consider his home run chase fun and exciting? No fair arguing that because of what you now know, you didn't think it was fun and exciting. You can't revise history.

Net: People like and are entertained by baseball far more than they are put off by purported violations of its statistical integrity.

Another alternative view of the steroids thing has to do with the apparent belief by many of the bigger worriers that these drugs have magical properties -- properties that go far beyond the mere building up of muscles and confer something like super-human powers on their users -- like Popeye downing a can of spinach. But an interesting aspect of the whole “cheating” discussion is what, exactly, the administration of steroids accomplishes – whether it enhances one’s baseball skills as dramatically as is generally assumed, to the point where it puts a user in an entirely separate skill-and-strength category, inclusion in which renders him ineligible for such earthly honors as the Hall of Fame.

In that regard, I subscribe to the Chi Chi Rodriguez theory -- that hitting home runs, like hitting golf balls a long way, is about technique, not strength. In golf, no one seriously disputes that; it's clearly why Rodriguez, a professional golfer and a little slip of a guy, was able to drive a golf ball a mile, as are many, many other small-to-average-sized players. But for some reason, there’s an assumption among baseball observers that sheer strength confers upon a hitter an ability he previously lacked – the ability to hit a ball far enough to make it go over the fence – even though hitting a baseball well is every bit as complex a process as hitting a golf ball well. In neither case will sheer strength give you good results. The poster boy for that argument, of course, is Henry Aaron, the guy who hit the most home runs but who was of average size/strength and who presumably didn't use steroids.

Hitting a baseball far is about bat speed, patience, weight distribution, and general hitting skill and experience. If it were about size/strength, then all big strong guys would hit a lot of homers, and no little guys would hit any. But that's not the case. Plus all the folks that doped up -- and apparently there were a great many who did -- would have turned into powerhouses; but that didn't happen either. Not because they didn't get stronger, but because they still couldn't hit. (It’s like the old joke: Doc, will I be able to play the piano after I get this cast off my arm? Well, sure. Great, because I couldn’t play it before.)

Do steroids provide a bit more bat speed? Maybe. Do they turn some pop flies into just-over-the-wall homers? A few, no doubt. Do they give folks a sense of confidence they wouldn't otherwise have. Maybe that, too. Did they turn legions of banjo hitters into home-run hitting machines? Nah. Three players -- Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa, and Barry Bonds -- exceeded the previous record. Not fifty; not a hundred; not ten. Three. Somewhere between dozens and hundreds of players used performance enhancing drugs of some sort, but only those three produced any unusual results. Did steroid use double or triple the output of of the big hitters, like McGwire, et. al.? Nah. Mark McGwire's 65 homers in '98 was a 5% increase over the previous record.

None of this is to suggest that steroid use had no effect, but only that steroids do not have the magical properties some people attribute to them and lack the ability to change outcomes to the extent that their use fundamentally altered the nature of the game and its sacred records, as some people argue.

A third alterntive view is about the nature of conditioning and muscle-building in general. Years ago, the epigramatist and professional cynic H.L.Mencken made fun of the Catholic church’s stand on birth control, which held that the so-called rhythm method -- counting days -- was the only acceptable form. Mencken said that the church, in telling its flock how sex-without-conception could be accomplished, was approving the outcome, but sanctioning only one method of achieving it, while condemning to hell those who used others. In short, he said, the church approved of the use of mathematics but not chemistry or physics for avoiding pregnancy. Mencken’s point, of course, was that if the intention is to have sex but not conceive a child, it is obviously intellectually dishonest to brand one way of doing so a sin, and another not.

Baseball’s hand-wringing discussions about the use of steroids – most notably by home-run kings McGwire, Bonds, Sosa, but also a host of other lesser lights – is an interesting parallel. If the intention is to get very strong for the purpose of enhancing your baseball-playing prowess, the question can be legitimately asked: What difference does it make how you do it? How is one way more moral and/or more “natural” than another? If it’s not against the rules – and it wasn’t when McGwire et. al. purportedly did it – in what sense is it cheating to ingest or inject material that renders you stronger – or, for that matter, peppier, or more awake, or less tired, or pain-free? And what’s the difference between ingestion and injection, when it comes to introducing materials into your bloodstream? Why, in other words, is physics – e.g.,weight lifting – preferable to chemistry.

The more libertarian among us might argue that all should be free to put anything in their bodies they want, for whatever purpose, as long as it doesn’t harm anyone else. But because of the generally acknowledged health dangers of muscle-building substances, baseball has made a judicious decision to declare them against the rules. And so, to use them now would certainly qualify as cheating – breaking the rules and, in so doing, gaining an unfair and illicit advantage over your competitors. But that was not the case when McGwire is purported to have muscled up via steroid use. It wasn’t against the rules, and whether it afforded him an unfair advantage vis a vis his competitors is problematical, as widespread as the use of strength-building substances is thought to have been in baseball, and in other sports, as well.

As for the Hall of Fame and keeping people out of it, there is a distinction between McGwire/Sosa/Bonds et. al., and the most famous of the no-inductees, Pete Rose, that is probably worth preserving: McGwire and Bonds did what they did to be better baseball players. What Rose did had nothing to do with becoming a better player, and had the potential to destroy the sport. Big difference. It’s not for nothing that baseball recoils as fiercely as it does from any and all connections to gambling. Betting by any person associated with any team inevitably raises the specter of fixing and throwing. Baseball will die a horrible death if it becomes generally accepted that game outcomes are pre-determined.

That said, however, both McGwire and Rose belong in the Hall of Fame, as does any other player whose statistics merit inclusion. And they all would be if baseball didn’t take itself so depressingly seriously. The Hall is, among other things, an important marketing tool for baseball, and should therefore be understood as the hall of fame, not the hall of goodness or of moral approbation, or even of success and accomplishment. Everyone who both did well enough at the sport and was sufficiently famous or infamous to help put (and keep) baseball on the map would thus be in it, saint and sinner alike. It’s well understood that The Hall already includes a good many egregious sinners, among them baseball’s most famous and revered, Babe Ruth himself. But if the transgressions of the likes of Rose and McGwire are of such a higher order of offensiveness as to give sensitive baseball people a case of the vapors, then label them as among the scoundrels in baseball’s great and colorful historical parade, and let it go at that. It seems like Soviet-style revisionist history to expunge from the record of baseball greatness all traces of some of its greatest players because of actions someone disapproves of.

As to the notion of "cheating," it seems fair to wonder how those who are in such high dudgeon over it view such practices as flopping on the floor like a dead mackerel to fool the ref into thinking you've been fouled. Is that cheating? Um, well, yeah. How about trapping the baseball, then holding it up in the air to signifiy that you caught it? Or gouging, pushing, punching, and grabbing at the line of scrimmage? Those things are cheating, in any commonly accepted sense of the word, and if you think getting it past the ump/ref removes it from the cheating category, then your moral compass is in need of serious recalibration.