Major League Baseball’s problem with steroids has become a summer tradition as reliable as the sport itself. Every year we’re treated to stories about some big-name figure being outed as a former user of the drug. Lots of hand-wringing, further allegations, and sometimes even congressional hearings follow, but none of this is ever good enough to dispel the specter of steroid-enhanced performance that returns every year to hang over the sport.
Major League Baseball’s problem with steroids has become a summer tradition as reliable as the sport itself. Every year we’re treated to stories about some big-name figure being outed as a former user of the drug. Lots of hand-wringing, further allegations, and sometimes even congressional hearings follow, but none of this is ever good enough to dispel the specter of steroid-enhanced performance that returns every year to hang over the sport.
This year, there’s an impressive figure attached to the scandal, but as an interesting contrast to years past, the public response has been underwhelming. There is no wide-scale derision and no public disillusionment, a result of the affected star being one of the games current most popular players, Manny Ramirez.
For some background, Ramirez was discovered early this season to have synthetic testosterone in his body. He and his lawyers were planning to dispute the result of this test, saying the synthetic testosterone was a result of DHEA (for the full story, check out this excellent ESPN article), a substance not banned by Major League Baseball. MLB disagreed that Manny’s elevated testosterone could have come from the substance, and Manny was going to fight the charges. That was until MLB got ahold of Manny’s personal medical records, a tactic allowed under a previous agreement with the players union, and they found a prescription for hCG, a substance banned by MLB. At that point Ramirez was suspended for 50 games and the lack of introspection commenced.
Now, it’s pretty clear from the article linked above that Manny Ramirez was taking steroids to enhance his playing ability, and it’s also clear that he knew what he was doing. Still, the first and most widely asked question to come out of the big-name bust was, “How will this affect the Dodgers’ competitive edge?”
Indeed, it’s really no wonder that baseball players have used steroids and continue to use steroids. Even if the sport bans it, there’s no culture that disallows it, and in some senses the emphasis on competition includes an “at all costs” qualifier that encourages steroid use. This is made obvious by the fact that early discussion about Ramirez’s 50-game suspensions focused on the Dodgers’ chances for dominating their division. For further evidence, just look at the response Los Angeles Times writers have received for their recent editorials on the subject.
In a piece where he accuses Dodgers fans of resembling Giants fans (who continued to support the steroid-supported Barry Bonds), Bill Plaschke offers one fan’s emailed response to his criticisms of Ramirez:
This year has been nothing but great. Thirteen straight home victories, and when do the Dodgers lose? When Manny gets suspended. So as far as I’m concerned, give the man a contract extension until 2020!
Plaschke interprets this to mean that “The loudest Dodgers baseball fans want to win at all costs, even if the price is drugs and deceit.”
Another editorialist at the Los Angeles Times, Kurt Streeter, writes that this “lack of outrage” over Manny Ramirez reveals “scrambled priorities.” Towards the end of his editorial, Streeter focuses on the physically destructive aspects of steroids, quoting a doctor who equates steroids with smoking four packs of cigarettes a day. But for the majority of his piece he focuses on cheating.
One of Streeter’s respondents writes in, “Save the moral panic. “Most of your readers under the age of 70 have done the same long ago. . . . Is taking steroids cheating? Sure, maybe.”
That “maybe” reveals the ambivalence that baseball fans have typically expressed when asked about their heroes being outed as drug users. Even when the emphasis is on cheating, fans will readily admit that cheating is what has occurred, but it doesn’t seem to bother them. This is the desire to win at all costs, a goal that produces athletes, managers, and teams who want to win at all costs, and whose pursuit is eventually rewarded by the industry as well as the fans in the form of fatter paychecks, record books, and championships.
“Rules are rules,” Streeter responds,
They exist for a reason. We might not like them. They might make our games less interesting. We might wish they were different, but we either abide by them or we get chaos. We get Bernie Madoff; fake, flimsy loans; economic Armageddon. We get Bonds, Clemens, A-Rod and now, Manny Ramirez.
Streeter realizes that many baseball fans simply don’t care about the rules and he wants to get his audience thinking about what happens when the rules are willfully bypassed. The problem is that when sportswriters use the term “cheating” to invoke some moral authority over users of steroids, their criticism is seen merely as a bland reference to the rules, which are often seen as an arbitrary aspect of the game. In baseball, the managers who absurdly engage in shouting matches with umpires are indicative of this attitude.
Moreover, casting the steroid scandal (or even more ridiculously, the rules of a professional sport) in terms of morality is a huge discursive mistake. Whether or not taking steroids is immoral is beside the point. We look to our athletes to show us what is humanly possible, and the rules they follow can in some respects limit their abilities to demonstrate this. Furthermore, few viewers are ready to believe that the rules of the game are totally inviolable, like some kind of natural law handed down from God.
Thus, the focus on cheating is not something that will discourage steroid use. Instead, we should think of steroid use as something that is merely impractical. If a majority of baseball players were to engage in steroid use, then fans would likely doubt they were seeing what is humanly possible. Steroid-addled stars would no longer be thought of as athletes at their peak performance, but as dependents.
Fortunately, MLB has seen that wide-scale steroid-use is impractical for its business model and it has begun to crack down on offenders. But the only thing that will tamper steroid-use is wide-scale derision of guilty players coupled with financial dis-incentives. Ramirez has not truly be subject to such a response. Without these things, steroids are implicitly encouraged and we can be sure the problem will come back next year.
Dodger Stadium, taken by flickr user kla4067
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