Baseball and steroids: Channeling for Mark Emmons, By: Craig Lancaster

March 22, 2006

The estimable Mark Emmons, one of our sports feature writers, has submitted the following piece for your consideration. I'm posting it here on Mark's behalf:

There is an intriguing op-ed article in Wednesday’s edition of the Mercury News. Steve Salerno, author of the book "SHAM: How the Self-help Movement Made America Helpless," makes the case that people in general, and sportswriters in particular, are hypocrites when it comes to getting so bent out of shape about Barry Bonds and his steroid use. In a nutshell, Salerno argues that what exactly counts as improper performance enhancement has become a very fuzzy line. He asks: Why is Lasik surgery to improve eyesight and Tommy John elbow surgery to save a pitcher’s career allowable, but steroids is a great sin? Aren’t they all "unnatural" ways to enhance performance?

This is an idea that I’ve written about a few times in the Merc during the long national nightmare that has been the Balco scandal. My own belief is pretty simple: Lasik and elbow surgery are legal procedures allowed by the rules of baseball. Steroids are illegal without a doctor’s prescription and have been against baseball’s rules since Commissioner Fay Vincent made them so in the early 1990s. Case closed. But Salerno is making a very libertarian point - and maybe even a very California point. What people do with their bodies, as long as it doesn’t harm others, should be their business. Implied is the fact that there’s even a bonus element to these sports gladiators doing whatever it takes to excel in the arena: We, the fans, ultimately benefit because we get entertained.

But there is one flaw, I believe, to Salerno’s logic. Yes, Bonds is a big boy (actually, he’s become a very big guy) and he is entitled to make an adult decision about what to put in his body -- especially since nobody in baseball seemed to care. If he wants to potentially ruin his long-term health by turning his body into a chemistry experiment, well then that’s his choice. But the great tragedy of Bud Selig and Don Fehr turning a blind eye to steroids is that ballplayers who might not have wanted to cheat and risk their health felt that they were forced into doing exactly that. Lesser ballplayers had to decide if they were willing to cut a deal with the devil: Take substances that might make them better now and provide financially for their families, yet ultimately could harm them in the long run. (Anyone remember the East German swim team, folks? Yeah, they won Olympic gold medals, but many have had horrible health problems later in life.) If you don’t think many, many ballplayers faced this question, you’re hopelessly naive and probably still waiting for that "definitive" proof that Bonds took a whole medicine cabinet full of substances. The new book "Game of Shadows" states that even the greatest ballplayer of our time -- Bonds -- felt like he had to take steroids to compete with the likes of Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa. How could other ballplayers not feel the same pressure?

Salerno looks at all the medical and nutritional advancements now available to ballplayers and asks the question: "Would you have baseball revert to what it was in Abner Doubleday’s era?" No, but I equally don’t want a sport to be content to wallow in The Steroid Era. Athletes shouldn’t have felt compelled to risk their health just to level out a playing field that had been allowed to become chemically uneven.