OP/ED: Surgery and steroids both assault baseball's records

April 4, 2006

Baseball season is upon us, and with it, another season of hand-wringing over Barry Bonds, steroids and what the two together symbolize about the downfall of Western civilization (all of this now culminating in an investigation just announced by MLB). I respectfully submit that the folks making these arguments haven't thought things through.

Baseball purists contend that steroids give a player an unfair advantage over his contemporaries and, worse, facilitate an artificially enhanced assault on some of the sport's sacred records. Bonds' angriest critics suggest that if the allegations against him are proved, his single-season home run record (73) should be expunged. Further, they argue, if Bonds breaks Hank Aaron's career home run record, that achievement should carry an asterisk, identifying it as tainted.

Trouble is, the reasoning that underlies such arguments is itself tainted.

The level playing field that supposedly links baseball's past and present is a fiction, given cyclical fluctuations in mound height, ballpark dimensions and such. But more to the point, the ever-advancing science that supports player performance and longevity has evolved to the point where distinctions between treatment and enhancement, maintenance and modification — even between natural and artificial — blur to the point of meaninglessness.

Right now, in the same newspapers that contain articles damning steroids and hailing the sanctity of baseball's records, you'll find upbeat features on athletes who have enhanced their careers via ulnar collateral ligament reconstruction, better known as ''Tommy John surgery.'' This yields perhaps an extra decade of useful elbow life and an ''unnatural'' assault on baseball record books. John himself recorded 147 of his 231 career wins after his revolutionary 1974 procedure.

Moreover, pitchers say they throw harder post-operatively. Reliever Billy Koch, who hit the upper 90s with his original-equipment arm, was unofficially clocked as high as an astonishing 108 mph after the surgery. Tellingly, Koch joked to USA Today, ''I recommend it to everybody, regardless (of) what your ligament looks like.'' There are several hundred Major Leaguers whose careers might have ended, but for this one surgery alone.

Or, consider Lasik and other vision enhancements, which allow almost any athlete to instantly own the visual acuity that helped make Ted Williams a nonpareil hitter. And, this isn't a case of athletes with sub-par vision trying to be ''normal.'' It's a case of athletes with normal vision trying to be exceptional.

The irony is that all this may be much ado about little anyway, because the straight-line relationship that many draw between enhancements and performance does not exist. This is true even of steroids. If admitted user Jose Canseco can be believed, hundreds of Major League players became juicers during the past generation. None has approached what Bonds has achieved. Critics use Ken Caminiti as a poster boy for reckless steroid abuse, blaming the drugs for his untimely death; Caminiti topped out at 40 home runs in his MVP-winning season, 1996.

Say what you will about Bonds, he has realized his physical potential to a degree that no other player can claim. Perhaps it wasn't steroids per se that enabled him to transcend, but rather, his almost superhuman dedication to training. There is no way to separate out the variables neatly.

Yes, steroids are illegal and have harmful side effects. It's also true that we live in a society that allows us to self-destruct by any number of means. Here again, the distinctions we draw are impossibly arbitrary. In a culture that continues to celebrate the consumption of alcohol despite the documented damage it does, how can we plausibly vilify a guy who takes steroids with a specific athletic goal in mind?

Leave Bonds alone, folks. And leave sports alone. Tolerate, if not embrace, a Darwinistic climate wherein every player attempts to achieve what he can, however he can: ''Survival of the fittest.'' No other approach makes sense.

Steve Salerno of Macungie writes often on baseball, and this article first appeared in the Los Angeles Times, a Tribune Publishing Co. newspaper. His latest book is ''SHAM: How the Self-Help Movement Made America Helpless'' (Crown).

''John himself recorded 147 of his 231 career wins after his revolutionary 1974 procedure.''