Take Me Out To The Ultra-Ball Game

So Major League Baseball has thrown out a dragnet again and hauled in 14 players accused of using so-called performance enhancing drugs. And the biggest catch in this batch of alleged cheaters is the New York Yankees’ Alex Rodriguez, who has long been considered a certainty to join other immortals in the baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York.

When MLB announced that Rodriguez had failed a drug test and faced a lengthy suspension, he needed just 13 home runs to tie Hall of Famer Willie Mays’s home run total of 660, which places Mays fourth on the list of all-time home run kings behind Barry Bonds (also accused of using drugs), Hank Aaron and Babe Ruth. ESPN reported that Rodriguez’s contract calls for him to receive a substantial bonus when he matches Mays’s mark. That doesn’t seem quite fair to reward a juiced Rodriguez for reaching a milestone that was accomplished by players who weren't using any sort of performance-enhancing drugs to achieve their prodigious totals.

And to me, that’s the reason it matters that Rodriguez and Bonds achieved their impressive career statistics while using drugs. Baseball, more than any other major league professional sport, is tied to its history and its superstars that have been spread across more than a century of play. The statistics compiled by stars of bygone eras are part of the appeal of the game and a topic that can be endlessly discussed and debated by old fans and young fans.

“Baseball fans love to argue statistics,” Benjamin Hoffman wrote in today’s New York Times. “Mentions of Willie Mays or Ted Williams are often accompanied by the caveat that they lost time to war. Jackie Robinson, who broke baseball’s color barrier, would have had even better statistics had he been allowed to play before he was 28.”

Cynical fans ridicule the anti-drug sentiment and argue that drug use doesn’t matter and that players should be allowed to do whatever they can to improve their performances. It’s nobody’s business what they do to their own bodies, the argument goes.

But here’s the thing about that ultra-libertarian perspective about MLB and drugs: If you’re going to do that, you might as well close and seal the baseball record books from 1904 – when the Major Leagues as we know them began – until 1997 – the season before a steroids-enhanced Mark McGwire hit 70 home runs in 1998 to become the first juiced player to set a season record for home runs.

A few years after Bonds, McGwire, Sammy Sosa and other “enhanced” players elevated seasonal home run totals beyond anything seen since the beginning of the sport, MLB actually started enforcing its no-drugs rules. Seasonal home run totals by MLB players, which had escalated dramatically in the late 1990s, came back down to Earth. And that dramatic decline in home runs made the effect of drug use on baseball’s sacred statistics obvious to anyone who cared to compare the numbers.

So if you want to allow juiced players to play MLB, then close the record books from 1904 to 1997, declare the Baseball Hall of Fame at Cooperstown to be filled to capacity with stars of “old” baseball, and start over with record-keeping and a new league and a new game. Call it “ultra-baseball” or “extreme baseball” or “robo-baseball” or “ultimate baseball,” something to indicate that this is not a game for mere wimpy mortals but a game that’s being played by super-evolved, chemically enhanced cyber-humans.

Then, instead of arguing whether Willie Mays, Mickey Mantle or Duke Snider was the best centerfielder of his era, you can argue about whether Barry Bonds’s home run total would have been higher if he’d avoided steroids and used a different type of performance-enhancing drug. That doesn’t seem to have the same appeal as talking about Willie, Mickey and The Duke, but I suppose it could make for a lively debate among chemists.

NOTE: The photo at the top was published by the New York Daily News on October 8, 2011 and shows Alex Rodriguez after he struck out to end the game that the New York Yankees lost to the Detroit Tigers, 3-2 in the American League Divisional Championship Series.

Baseball's steroids era mirrors America's obsession with excess

So Mark McGwire (above, right) finally has admitted that he was juiced when he and Sammy Sosa (left) resurrected America’s interest in baseball with their spectacular home run duel in 1998.

McGwire and Sosa accounted for 136 home runs that summer, and their chase of Roger Maris’s single-season record of 61 captured the nation’s attention unlike any event since the cancellation of the 1994 World Series because of a contract dispute between the Major League Players Association and team owners.

Author Jacques Barzun once noted that anyone wanting to understand America should learn about baseball. So if baseball is a microcosm of America, maybe our current financial mess was foretold in the cancellation of the ’94 series and the McGwire-Sosa home run extravaganza four years later.

During negotiations for a new labor contract in 1994, team owners wanted to establish a limit on players’ salary increases. The Major League Players Association didn’t want limits and threatened to strike if the owners tried to impose them. Neither side budged by the September 14 deadline, so the rest of the season and the World Series were cancelled.

It was a stunning indicator of how deeply the obsession with money had penetrated our national psyche. Despite the chaos and uncertainty caused by two world wars and the Great Depression, the World Series had been played every year since 1905. But in 1994 this venerable event could not survive the immovable greed of millionaire players and billionaire owners.

Fans were furious and interest in the game plummeted when the 1995 season began.

Yet Major League Baseball’s annual revenue has steadily increased since the strike. Blomberg.com reported that MLB had a record $6.5 billion in revenue for the 2008 season, and that seven teams set attendance records.

How did MLB overcome fans’ disgust and increase revenue in the wake of the 1994 strike? CNN noted in 2006 that MLB tapped into Internet-driven income sources that didn’t exist at the time of the strike. But the foundation for the revenue surge of the past decade was laid when team owners and league administrators looked the other way while talented athletes boosted their already exceptional skills with steroids. Some players built up muscle mass that seemed supernatural and launched phenomenal home run outbursts at a time in their careers when such totals typically declined among players of earlier eras.

Fan excitement returned when longstanding home run records were shattered by apparent super-athletes who seemed on the verge of eclipsing the careers of legendary earlier stars such as Babe Ruth, Willie Mays, Mickey Mantle and Hank Aaron. Crowds filled the stadiums. The damage from the lost World Series of 1994 seemed short-lived and greatly over-estimated.

The home run orgy in Major League baseball coincided with a national obsession with excess that blossomed in the 1990s and continued after the turn of the century. Everyone wanted bigger houses, bigger automobiles, bigger cheeseburgers. Big was in, biggest was best. Merely having enough wasn’t nearly enough. You had to have far more than enough, and you had to display it conspicuously. Never mind that you’d used a junk mortgage – the financial equivalent of steroids – to buy a $600,000 house on a $35,000 income, or that you’d artificially inflated your living standard by making minimum payments at 18 percent interest on a half-dozen maxed-out credit card accounts. You were living large, and that’s what life has been all about for the past 20 years.

And what about those who said this artificial prosperity couldn’t last and sooner or later everything would collapse and there’d be hell to pay? Whiners. Losers. Girly men.

When McGwire’s and Sosa’s home run battle took place in 1998, everyone thought we’d all become Internet millionaires by the Millennium. McGwire hit 70 home runs; Sosa hit 66. Both players surpassed a season home run mark that had been reached only twice in the previous 71 years.

But amid all the excitement, rumors emerged that many Major League players – including McGwire and Sosa – were using steroids. And the rumors escalated in 2001 when Barry Bonds hit 73 home runs and started closing in on the record for career home runs held by Hank Aaron.

MLB’s halfhearted effort to police steroids was undermined when the players’ union diluted attempts to monitor players. So the league hired former U.S. Senator George Mitchell to investigate steroid use. He filed his report in December 2007 – about the same time that some people were getting seriously worried about the proliferation of shoddy mortgages and the unheard-of escalation of housing prices.

Mitchell’s report linked some of the game’s most prominent names to steroid use.

New York Yankees superstar Alex Rodriguez admitted in early 2009 that he’d used steroids earlier in his career. Rodriguez’s admission came as an edgy nation watched stock prices tumble and jobs disappear amid revelations of spectacular mismanagement and fraud in the financial industry.

It also was revealed that superstar pitcher Roger Clemens may have lied to Congress during an investigation that followed Mitchell’s report. And Barry Bonds faces trial for allegedly lying to federal investigators about his steroid use.

So now, all those flashy home run records of the late 1990s look as phony as a Bernie Madoff financial statement. Meanwhile, home run totals for seasonal leaders in both Major Leagues have declined and now are closer to the totals compiled by mere mortal players before the era of steroid supermen.

And in the real world, Americans are making do with less as they struggle to clean up the financial wreckage caused by years of mindlessly pursuing a lifestyle of wretched excess.

Baseball survived its painful return to normalcy. We have to hope that this is an indicator that America also will readjust to reality.

(Photo of Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire is by CP Photo)