I hate the steroid era, By Evan Harris

10/4/06

After a grueling 162-game season, the Major League Baseball playoffs are set to commence. They're less exciting than sports enthusiasts would like to admit, but the race to enter October was a long and exhilarating one for the likes of St. Louis, San Diego and Los Angeles. And for the teams that didn't quite get in this year -- like Philadelphia, Florida and the Chicago White Sox -- next year is only a stone's throw away.

Baseball players are ready to celebrate the most important month of the major league season, and on the brink of Detroit traveling to the Bronx for the beginning of the Divisional Series, there is steroid talk.

Fantastic.

But it's not just any steroid talk; it's pretty heavy. Household names such as Roger Clemens, Andy Pettitte and Miguel Tejada are now associated with human growth hormones and other anabolic steroids. But is anyone surprised?

I'm not implicating any of them. In fact, "innocent until proven guilty" needs to apply here. But any fan, federal agent, athlete, owner or any yahoo likes to go on witch hunts, which is what this is to some degree.

But I'm going to play blind and naive in this situation for a couple reasons. First, I don't want to believe Clemens shot a needle into his ass or was pill popping. The guy is one of the greatest right-handed pitchers of all-time, and if he is implicated on steroid allegations, it tarnishes every Cy Young Award he has ever won. That makes we fans out to be fools. Fools, I say!

The second reason for acting like a stubborn 5-year-old -- and the most important, in my mind -- is jealousy. No, I'm not jealous of athletes taking steroids -- I have natural athleticism and very defined features. I'm just jealous of our parents and grandparents.

Not because of their nose hairs, certainly not because of the colonoscopies or even the forced diets to get your cholesterol down. I'm jealous of their baseball era. They lived to see baseball at its finest, free of steroid talk and full of mystique. Where is our mystique? Mickey Mantle hit a homerun in 1961 with virtually one arm in the heat of the home run race with Roger Maris. And for us, Sammy Sosa throws out his back by sneezing.

It's just not fair. They lived to see Hank Aaron break Babe Ruth's home run record, Roberto Clemente pioneer a Hispanic migration into the big leagues, Bob Gibson throw 13 shutouts in a season, Sandy Koufax and Don Drysdale dominate hitters as the most feared pitching duo and Willie Mays make ridiculous over-the-shoulder catches in deep center field.

And that's only to name a few. There was still Whitey Ford, Yogi Berra, Frank Robinson, Brooks Robinson, Ernie Banks, Warren Spahn and Eddie Matthews. Who do we have? Ken Griffey Jr. could have been up there with the greats had he not injured himself away from the home run record. Barry Bonds, Mark McGwire and Clemens were once record holders who are now knee-deep in steroid allegations. Sure, we have Derek Jeter diving into the stands and Curt Schilling's bloody sock and Pedro Martinez giving the Stone-Cold Stunner to Don Zimmer.

But the steroid era is cheating us out of quality baseball.

And even if fewer players take 'roids than we think, the "possibility" and the witch hunts will always overshadow this era of baseball, just like it did this week. Rather than celebrating a return to October and the World Series chase, we are worrying about whether "The Rocket" took steroids. I guess it's just the era we were born into. And the best way to cope with it is to embrace it.

I'll have the cliched father-to-son talk 20 years from now: "In my day, baseball players put needles in their asses, had smaller balls and hit home runs farther than your eyes could see. I remember Albert Belle corking his bat and then stalking a woman on his way to jail time. Those were the days!"

Oy vey.

I guess all I can do as a baseball traditionalist is try to live baseball's glory years through my dad. And hopefully, the likes of Ryan Howard, David Wright, Albert Pujols, Johan Santana and Dontrelle Willis can give me something to tell future generations.

Because this Albert Belle thing just won't cut it.