Baseball as Society's Mirror

Guest Post by Daniel Cornellier
Sports, like many things in our society, reflect things that are happening within it, and just like movies, music, or TV, also have diehard fans that treat their team winning as life or death. Everyone knows someone that takes sports so seriously that you cannot help but think once in a while, “imagine if they actually cared about things that mattered?” There was a time when professional athletes had to work in the off-season, and baseball is generally the sport noted when talking about such a thing. “Like many players before the salary boom that began in the late 1970s, [Yogi] Berra returned home and found an offseason job” (baseballhall.org). In Yogi Berra’s time, baseball wasn’t the multi-million dollar product that it is now. In 1947, the minimum pay was only $5,000; today, it is $507,500 (theatlantic.com). No one can argue against the fact that baseball players 70 years ago played the game for the love of it; there simply wasn’t enough money there to play it for a full-time career.

We live in an era where professional baseball players (and other professional athletes) are idolized in our society. As a result of that, many children look up to them as a bastion of hope, and when I was a child I absolutely did. Therefore, when athletes get caught cheating, it is often a polarizing experience for people. When Alex Rodriguez was caught using performance enhancing drugs, he did everything within his power to not take blame for using them, and instead chose to deflect on others. He never seemed like he was sorry for it, and why would he be? As a society, we are obsessed with the biggest, strongest, fastest, etc., and when these athletes make unbelievable amounts of money, it makes sense that they might attempt to gain an unfair advantage. As a child, I fondly remember the home run race of 1998, when Mark McGwire of the St. Louis Cardinals and Sammy Sosa of the Chicago Cubs duked it out in an attempt to past Roger Maris’s record of 61 home runs in a single MLB season. It was a competition of the most primal nature; two men fighting head-to-head, one of them to be the ultimate victor. They both ended up breaking the record of 61 – Sosa finished with 66 home runs, and McGwire with 70. Even as an eight-year-old at the time, I knew there was something off about those two. I had heard mentions of steroids here and there, but that didn’t mean much to me. This is relevant because as a society, everybody watched the home run race. People that didn’t care for sports were watching it, my grandparents that didn’t watch sports were watching it; society was tuned in, and anyone that was watching TV knew about the home run race. Even now, most people can remember the home run race, and remember it fondly. As a society, no one cared that Sosa and McGwire were using steroids; the product that Major League Baseball was putting out was very entertaining, and everyone loved to watch it. It was talked about at the water cooler, at school, literally everywhere, so why did people suddenly care about PEDs when Rodriguez was caught?

Baseball for a long time has been considered “America’s pastime;” anyone that watches it will tell you that. Baseball is considered a gentleman’s game, so celebrating is something that many look down upon. If a batter celebrates a home run too much, they can expect to possible be hit the next time they come up to bat. It’s a thinking man’s game. If you go to a game, you will still see people in the crowd keeping track of the score in their own scorebook, as a throwback to back when it was all done by hand. A baseball game has no time limit, although recently some rules have been modified in an attempt to speed along the game. The longest game ever was in 1981 between two Triple A teams: the Pawtucket Red Sox and the Rochester Red Wings. It lasted 33 innings (with a suspension after 32 endings), and had a total time of 8 hours and 25 minutes (infoplease.com). Baseball is a “sacred” game, and many people believe when someone cheats they deserve to be punished. Why then, when Alex Rodriguez cheated did people want to go on a witch hunt and burn him at the stake? Quite simply, the MLB didn’t care at the time because McGwire and Sosa were making them an absolute boatload of money. Four years before the home run race, there was a strike in in the 1994 season, resulting in what many called an absolute low point for professional baseball. How could a sport that is supposed to be a staple of Americana be stopped by something as fickle as money? The 1994 strike is widely considering an embarrassment to the sport of baseball, and the 1998 home run race was absolutely what they needed. Many fans of the game stopped watching after the strike, and as I previously mentioned, the home run race brought not only baseball’s fans back, but created many fans that didn’t exist before.

In America, we often like to follow trends. The 1998 home run race is a perfect example of a trend, because not only did baseball fans watch it, the world did. It transcended baseball, and honestly, it saved baseball. I have lived through many years of the sport as both a participant and a fan, and some of my fondest memories of watching the game come from that year. I have never been so glued so a sporting event like I was to that one, and there isn’t a fan of baseball that doesn’t think of McGwire when they think of Sosa, and vice versa. Those two are forever linked in the hall of baseball mythology, regardless that they used PEDs. Society nowadays wants to shun players that use them, but that same society is the one that forgets just how excited baseball was in the late 90s. Everyone loves to see a ball hit harder or faster, and in the moment it is more exciting to see a 450 foot home run than it is to see a 350 foot home run. It was, and remains to this day, very hypocritical of people to ostracize Alex Rodriguez, but not recognize that steroids literally saved baseball. Until there is a way to prove whether or not every player uses performance enhancing drugs, people (and society as a whole) need to let it go.

Thank you for taking the time to read this, and I hope to see you!

http://baseballhall.org/discover/when-the-offseason-meant-job-season

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/12/mlb-salaries-labor-contract-negotiations/419889/

http://www.infoplease.com/askeds/longest-professional-baseball-game.html

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Why I Support Lance...and PEDs...(originally posted 15 Jan 2013)

In 2005, again in 2007, and then again in 2010, I wrote on this issue, defending the use of controlled substances by sports figures...not a popular position then, and probably no more popular now. Like so many aspects of our schizophrenic culture, what is done in private is one thing, but what we self-righteously say in public is supposed to be something else entirely. Well, I don't play that game.

Right now, Lance Armstrong is in the trigger hairs of the media, which is frothing at the mouth to tear down yet another hero. It is a repetitive story in our culture: build up a hero, then tear them down (often followed by some semblance of public redemption).

I will not defend Lance because 'everyone does it' or because his foundation did such a wonderful job.

I defend Lance because its time to re-examine - and overthrow - the "reefer-Madness" opposition to Performance Enhancing Drugs ("PEDs"). I actually SUPPORT their use.


In 2007, the New York Times reported, “…Former Sen. Mitchell's 300-plus page document on performance-enhancing drugs in baseball, 21 months in the making, claims that nearly 90 players -- most notably Roger Clemens, Andy Pettitte, Barry Bonds, Gary Sheffield and Miguel Tejada -- are guilty of using some form of PEDs.” The indictment of Roger Clemens for allegedly lying to Congress is the next step in 'getting those guys' when they can't produce the evidence to convict on the original case. It's the Get-Martha-Stewart approach to justice.

When Mark Magwire was hounded by the press for using Androstendione ( a substance that was legal and sold over the counter in Golds Gyms, GNCs, and Drug Stores across America), it was easy to point the finger at “One Bad Guy.” When Barry Bonds was fingered as a steroid user, the writers at Sports Illustrated (sports nuts who cant play, but who delight in the catty process of creating legends and then destroying them) frothed at the mouth, issue after issue, because they could crucify One Bad Guy.

But now that steroids have appeared in major league baseball across the spectrum of time and teams, (as well as wrestling, football, basketball, and cycling) prosecutors can have a field day.

In 2005 I wrote:

“…Sitting on my shelf is a bottle of ProLab ThermaPro, a thermogenic designed to raise metabolism and help burn fat. I used this (same basic ingredients as the original Hydroxycut and Xenadrine) several summers ago, while running in the hot sun every morning while trying to lose weight and tone up (mission: successful!). Ah, but this product contains ephedrine!!! [crowd gasps in horror in the background.] When I used it in 2002, I was using a sports supplement. When the FDA banned it in 2004, I became the possessor of an illegal substance. When the Court overturned the FDA ban, I was an upstanding citizen again. Then the FDA declared that my 20 mg ephedrine was greater than the amount in the court case, and was illegal, and presto-chango, I’m a criminal again.

And this has been the history of steroids and sports supplements. The non-steroidal Androstendione which was available in every health and vitamin store a few years ago, all of a sudden disappeared because the FDA arbitrarily decided that since it was only “one step away” from a steroid, it is now illegal. However, DHEA, which is two chemical steps away from a steroid, is still OK. The steroids that Jose "save-my-own-ass" Canseco mentioned being used in MLB were by and large completely legal in 1980. Many of them are still legal in much of the world, including industrialized nations such as Germany and Holland. Some (Fina) can be made of 100% legal substances in a kitchen. Others are legal as veterinary substances. And a great deal comes into this country from upstanding American soldier-heroes, who discover that the rest of the developed world doesnt have the knee-jerk Prohibitionist response that America has.


The history of Sports is the history of going the extra mile and being slightly better than anyone and everyone else. Athletes give up much of their personal lives and incur a great personal cost in training. They regulate what they eat. They pound back protein shakes.They take vitamin supplements such as Calcium. They take Glutamine to prevent muscle breakdown. They take Milk Thistle and ALA to keep their livers healthy. They take Glucosomine to help repair their stressed joints, and if they’re in trouble, they get shots of Cortisone from their doctors. Some take “stacks” to raise metabolism and speed weight-loss (like my illegal aspirin-caffeine-ephedrine stack). They use Creatine as a muscle volumizer and NO2 to increase muscle pump, while downing extra-heavy whey-protein isolate shakes to increase food to muscle cells. Somewhere along the line Congress is going to find out that many use insulin to increase food nutrition entering the muscle cells as well. Some use 2-step-away prohormones like DHEA, others used 1-step-away-prohormones.

And yes, some use steroids. And the line between what is a legal substance to use, and what is an illegal substance, is arbitrary and artificial.

Yes, the bar is constantly raised. In the effort to be bigger, better, stronger, greater. And if anyone thinks that taking steroids means you take a pill and you’re suddenly Hulk, they are sadly misinformed. Guys who take steroid injections and just ‘wait’ for the effects find themselves fat and tired. An athlete who has chosen to use steroids will be working his butt off 5-6 days a week in grueling workouts. There is no ‘free ride’ by using steroids.

It is amazing, isn’t it? If someone goes to Beverly Hills and forks over $10,000 to a surgeon to have 40 pounds of lard sucked out of their gut in a two-hour operation, that is not only legal, it’s indicative of being One of the Beautiful People. But if you work your tail off during a 12-week steroid cycle to reduce your body fat from 15% to 6% through arduous workouts, well…..”that’s illegal! That’s immoral! That’s just not right!!!! We must punish baseball players! Lance is a cheat!”

Actually, it seems a hell of a lot more honest to me. Of course, why stop at baseball players, or with Lance?

Does anyone really believe that the models on the cover of Mens fitness magazines get that way from situps and spinach? Have they asked the Governor of California how he got that big?

Wake up, folk: when you outlaw a substance, you don’t make it go away…you make it go underground, and you increase the danger of its being tainted. Anyone remember Prohibition?

What’s more important, is that no one has been able to tell me just who is so harmed by an individual athlete’s choice to juice that it requires federal robocops. Have these sports figures killed anyone? Assaulted anyone? Robbed anyone? Maimed anyone? Can you point to any damage they have caused?

There are those who will say that when young people emulate these guys, they are hurt. But that’s like saying that NASCAR should be responsible for kids who drive fast, that McDonalds should be responsible for obese slobs who sit and eat Big Macs every day, and that Clint Eastwood should be responsible for a kid who shoots someone.

If the Players are upset, or the union, or the fans, or the owners, they have immediate remedies and avenues. If they have chosen not to pursue them, perhaps Congress should realize they’re barking up the wrong tree. We don’t need Congress to decide who should be and shouldn’t be our sports heroes. We’ll do that for ourselves, thank you.


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