The stench of hypocrisy
Staff Writer
Baseball has always been a sport famous for treating its fans like naive grade-schoolers, but the news that Major League Baseball has begun an investigation into steroid use among players marks a new level of hypocrisy-and not just on the part of MLB.
Chronicle John Storey
Barry Bonds says, “Whhhaaaaaattt?”
I believe a recent headline from the Onion summed it up pretty well: "Barry Bonds took steroids, reports everyone who has ever watched baseball." Let's be honest for two seconds here folks. You didn't start watching the game again because of Cal Ripken Jr.'s 2,131st consecutive game. If you're not from Baltimore and this is your contention, you're lying. Period.
The cancelling of the last two months and post-season in 1994 due to grievous failures on the part of both the owners and players wiped out a chance to see a .400 hitter (Tony Gwynn was batting .394 ) a chance to see Roger Maris' single-season HR record of 61 fall (Matt Williams, Ken Griffey Jr. and Frank Thomas were all in the hunt) and the first playoff featuring a new concept called the Wild-Card.
We were cheated. A bunch of whiny, narcissistic multi-millionaires had served notice to all fans of the game that not one player or owner born gives a fraction of a rat's behind about the people who ultimately write their paychecks.
Understandably, there was a major backlash. When MLB started it's season almost a month late in 1995 (after nearly starting it with replacement players) the glare of the sun off the empty seats in every ballpark in America was blinding. Owners were losing billions, players were demanding more and more money for their efforts. The game Earl Weaver once called "The greatest game of them all" was in serious financial trouble.
The 1995 World Series between Atlanta and Cleveland was ignored by virtually all except the PC-police who were there to protest the Native American mascots of each team. In mid-1996, Ripken surpassed Lou Gehrig's consecutive games record to a good deal of fanfare and newly-anointed commissioner Selig along with the top-brass of MLB desperately pointed to this as an example of the game's continuing appeal due to its supposed purity. The media blitz was insane, but outside of Baltimore, few fans were inspired to come back to the ballpark. Attendance and TV ratings continued their percipitous fall through the rest of 1996 and through 1997.
Which brings us to 1998. The year of the famed home-run race between Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa. By the end of Sosa's 20-HR June, we were all hooked. Never mind the volcanic acne which covered the face of the then-36 year-old McGwire or the obvious and unnatural weight and muscle-mass gains of Sosa. The fans not only turned a collective blind eye and deaf ear, they bought tickets in record numbers and were glued to their television sets in hopes of seeing history, suspicious aspects be damned! As for Selig and the owners, it's painfully obvious that they had their heads buried in the piles of money that were pouring in.
By now you may have read that the legacy-obsessed animal that is Bonds simply couldn't tolerate the fact that the spotlight was on players who, without their steroid use, were, in his estimation, his inferiors. Bonds had already punched his ticket to Cooperstown (he's the founding member of the career 500HR/500SB club), but wanted more. He wanted absolute immortality. He likely found it in the vials, pills, hypodermic needles and external creams and clears which were easily obtained and not against MLB rules. We all watched as the weight piled on, as his HR totals inflated to unprecedented levels punctuated by an unthinkable 73 in 2001. We watched as he passed Willie Mays to reach #3 on the all-time list and set his sights on Babe Ruth and Hank Aaron. Captivated, we bought more tickets, more hot dogs, more jerseys and hats. The commisioner's office continued to ignore any moral and ethical ramifications in favor of more profits. Business as usual.
We have since seen MLB impliment a steroid policy best described as far too late and way too little. We have crucified and ostracized Rafael Palmeiro for his positive test in 2005 and rewarded Jason Giambi with a Comeback Player of the Year Award for his return to productivity after a steroid sickness-induced slump that lasted a year and a half. None of this makes a lick of sense and now appears to be coming to a climactic peak in the form of "new" revelations about Bonds' drug use and an impending investigation by Selig's office.
Hold the stinkin' phone! What right does the man who tacitly endorsed steroid use for the better part of a decade have to level any kind of charges at Bonds or any other player who used steroids between 1997 and 2004? Lest you need to be reminded, Selig was the owner of the Milwaukee Brewers before becoming commissioner. As such, he not only understood the financial straits of the owners, but also had personal relationships with virtually all of them.
Is it so far-fetched to believe that Selig was begged by his peers to leave the rulebook empty of a steroid policy until profit-levels were stable again? Is it so impossible to believe that in light of this, he and the owners may have actually encouraged players to use the juice?
While I agree that each individual has a choice as to whether or not to take a substance of any kind, ask yourself: If you could take something that caused you to do your job much more effectively to the tune of an enormous pay increase, and it wasn't against company policy to do so, and everyone around you was using and leaving you in their collective dust in terms of performance and thus raking in massive piles of money, would you take the substance? Cut the self-righteous malarkey! Of course you would!
Is steroid use right? Of course not. But to focus all of our vitriolic rage on Bonds over this issue is beyond hypocritical. YOU, the fan, bought the tickets and took your kids to the games. YOU tuned in and celebrated with your buddies as the record books were stained with drug-induced figures. YOU, the fans and sports media, supported all of this until it suddenly became fashionable not to, and have repeatedly ignored the larger issues (the problem obviously starts at the top) involved.
It's easy to scapegoat Bonds, a less than likable figure that fans and media alike have had problems with for years. It is harder to examine ourselves and realize that we, as fans, were lured back to baseball by money obsessed suits who re-sold us a drugtainted version of the game we loved and still love.
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