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Fantasy Baseball As when one of your best friends comes out, you really knew it many years before. Only in the case of major league baseball players on steroids, it is neither arguably natural nor something you should ultimately embrace. Don’t believe the numbers either. Five to seven percent is a generic statistic for a lot of low estimates. The Department of Labor has been floating it lately for unemployment. Fact is, half these guys have forearms like my neck, necks like my thigh, and thighs like the oak in my backyard. I pine for the year 1980, when “roids” implied hemorrhoids, like George Brett’s and Jimmy Carter’s. When I watch games from the 70s on Classic Sports Network, I remind myself not to adjust my television. The figures appear horizontally collapsed and vertically elongated like a CinemaScope movie fit onto a pre-HDTV screen. There is room between a player’s sleeve and biceps. The second baseman of 1977 looks like the bat boy of 2004. Recently, Mark McGwire reemerged thirty-seven pounds lighter, minus the androstenedione, and bearing a strange resemblance to a human being—sort of like his rookie card with a forty-year-old head on it. McGwire seems to be enjoying life without the urge to kill people at a fender-bender. Turns out he can still drive a ball 550 feet. A golf ball. The anti-steroid movement could use McGwire as a poster boy, especially now that he can fit on one. Sure, Barry’s not on steroids. We’re free to believe that right up until Greg Anderson pulls a Sammy Bull. With John McCain looking like Estes Kefauver and Gene Orza looking like Frank Costello, that day may already be upon us. BALCO sounds like a crew from the Genovese family. Take the fifth all you want, guys—your power numbers give you away. You could fit the old Barry Bonds in the new Barry Bonds’ jock. And thanks to innovators like Anderson, you can sooner get your bookie into the clubhouse than you can your personal trainer. But there is some good news. I just saved a whole bunch of money on my car insurance. True story--my own flirtation with performance enhancing drugs took place in 1997, when I started using Creatine in my over-thirty hardball league. The change compared to the previous season was as follows: two more home runs, three more triples, and 467 more trips to the bathroom. On one of the home runs, I ran right past home plate to the men’s room. I got off the Creatine because the way I figured it, a kidney was worth more than an extra 0.045 on my slugging average. Yes, the details are embarrassing, but I had to get them out of my system. As a fan, the purist in me has suffered a mortal blow. To think there was a day when people debated the legitimacy of Roger Maris’s single-season home run record. Today, the asterisks need asterisks. And I’ve begun the long, lonely, tedious task of providing them. Using COBOL, Fortran, and machine language, I have replayed the 1996 to 2003 seasons in their entirety on my Gateway Profile 3, adjusting for steroid use and accompanying muscle and weight gain. Sure, it ate up most of my winter, and my divorce is pending. But the results were engaging. Here are just some of them. Omar Vizquel was the 1997 American League home run champion, with 17. Barry Bonds led the National League in doubles in the years 2000 through 2002, averaging 63 a year, most of them coming on balls that never quite reached the Bay. Mark McGwire had more singles than home runs instead of the other way around. Bubba Trammell was the 2001 National League MVP. The Tampa Bay Devil Rays took the series in back-to-back years in ’98 and ’99. Absurd? Maybe. There could be a glitch in my software. Problem is, like the real results, we’ll never really know. As in the stock market, government, and the Martha Stewart aisle at Kmart, the trust in baseball is gone. Sammy Sosa’s bat was corked. Now we have to wonder if Sammy Sosa was corked. For that sort of revelation, we just might have to see a player break. And we will. The only real question is how. Or how close. Fox’s catcher-cam allows us to watch a fastball explode in the zone. The next technological breakthrough may well be the upper-vena-cava-cam, showing blood vessels rupturing in the heart. Meanwhile, Pete Rose is looking better every day. At least he got that way without supplements. We all thought Jose Canseco was too hopped up on steroids to tell the truth about steroids. Turns out Canseco is the prophet of his generation. There are two ways to make easy money these days--hook up with Haliburton or sell urine to major league baseball players. Regaining the trust anytime soon is less likely than Michael Jackson opening a day care chain. This is not like the ’81 or ’94 strike. This is not about games missed. It’s about cups missed. This is not about shortened seasons. It’s about shortened life expectancies. Didn’t these galoots take anything away from Lyle Alzado’s last words? But if the juice was conceivably ever worth a shot, so is salvaging the game. One could ask, with the whole country running on performance enhancement drugs of one sort or another, are we really in a moral position to ban them on the field? We are most definitely not. But let’s do it anyway. Unless Major League Baseball is willing to accept a role in American pop culture as an upscale WWF, they must do whatever it takes. Give the players a urinalysis in the on-deck circle and another one while rounding third. Forget the salary cap. Try a triceps cap. But whatever you do, drop the denial. And please, drop the whole Bill of Rights routine. We in the upper mezzanine surrendered ours months ago, and we’re doing just fine. Baseball has nothing to fear but Fehr himself. Click here to rant back. |