Revenge of the Baseball Moralists
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

If there is any issue to make one lose all patience with everyone on all sides, it’s steroids.
You have cynical athletes looking to turn their willingness to break the law and risk grave health problems into a professional advantage. You have team owners and a commissioner reaping both the financial benefits of employing grotesquely muscle-bound players and the public-relations benefits of decrying drug abuse. And you have nihilist fans flocking to the ballparks, seeing nothing whatever wrong about any of this.
Also tossing in their two cents are a lot of shrieking ninnies who want to ban players from the game for actions that weren’t even banned by Major League Baseball at the time they were committed. In the name of an integrity that never has had any hold on the game, these so-called moralists want to strip the records of players who have been found guilty of nothing.
The lines are so set in place that the actual revelations of the last week did literally nothing to change the tenor or substance of the debate. What’s particularly maddening in all of this is that the problem of steroids in baseball is not being debated on its true merits.
The issues here are enormously difficult to understand. There are nuanced medical, political, and legal issues to consider, many of the latter having to do with the functions of a labor union that is unaccountably despised for simply doing what it is ethically required to do – protect its members.
Are steroids harmful if taken under medical supervision? Do they really do players any good? Should Congress change the tax code if baseball doesn’t institute a real testing program? How could such a program work when the strict Olympic and NFL programs are such jokes? These aren’t ideological questions, but in every instance baseball officials and journalists are more interested in scoring points for their side than in looking for answers.
More nuanced still are the moral issues dealing with individual freedom and accountability, which cocksure sportswriters are not notably well equipped to address. Certainly, Barry Bonds owes an explanation of his cheating ways to his opponents, whom he wronged when he sought the unfair edge offered by “the clear.” Precisely what explanation does he owe anyone else, including the FBI, Hank Aaron, and my 2-month-old son? Exactly who among these parties was harmed, and exactly how, by Bonds’s actions?
To place the crisis in its context requires a willingness to admit that because sports aren’t very important, there are worse things than Jason Giambi injecting Deca Durabolin. It also requires a memory that goes back farther than 1999.
Comparisons of Bonds to Willie Mays, for instance, have been cropping up all over, implicitly seeking to shame the godson by comparing him to the universally revered godfather. Mays, of course, spent at least part of his career high on amphetamines, as did a number of his contemporaries.
The generation before Mays’s and Aaron’s played segregated baseball; the generation that followed brought us the Pittsburgh drug trials. The steroid crisis may end up being worse for baseball than the exclusion of men like Josh Gibson from the major leagues, but it’s going to take a great deal more than outraged hyperventilations to convince me of that.
Tell me that Major League Baseball’s insistence on having the urban poor of Washington, D.C., pay for a park catering to rich suburbanites will do some lasting moral damage to the game, and I’ll take you seriously. Tell me that the same is true of the “startling revelation” that Barry Bonds is on human growth hormone, and I’m not sure I will.
The truth about Bonds, and other players whose names will surely come out one way or the other, has been obvious for all to see for years. Yet the blatantly obvious fact that nearly all the game’s top stars are juiced has endured more or less without consequence. Advertisers have not boycotted MLB, fans have not stopped going to games, journalists have not resigned their posts in protest of the charade they are now claiming the game has become.
The real truth is that everyone knew all along what was going on and no one really cared. The current outrage is less about steroids and more about covering up these unpleasant facts.
None of this is meant to condone the use of performance-enhancing drugs, or to serve as an apologia of any sort for those who have used them. Even more repellant than the professionally outraged is the coalition of the decadent, the greedy, the naive, the obtuse, and the perverse who grant the fact of massive, league-wide steroids abuse and shrug their shoulders.
Among them you would have to number Commissioner Bud Selig and the owners of every major league team; perhaps the most ridiculous aspect of the current fiasco is that these men, who winked and nodded and padded their pockets as the likes of Mark McGwire strutted around with bodybuilder sized muscles, are now attempting to play the noble wronged. They are nearly as culpable as the players themselves, and far more hypocritical.
With such disgusting characters pursuing their own interests on all sides, is there any way for an honorable resolution to this scandal? I think there is, but it will take a great deal of honesty and an awareness that the determined cheater will almost always succeed. After last week, that awareness is in no short supply. Honesty, it seems, is rarer than ever.