The pundits have spoken, and steroids, it would seem, are a bad thing. Performance enhancing drugs have undermined the integrity of a variety of sports over the past 25 years. This was not a big deal to Americans when the occasional track athlete or Olympic swimmer tested positive for performance enhancing substances. Steroid abuse, when a problem in the NFL, did not seem to bother the American sports spectator much either. In fact, I would argue that steroids enhanced the spectacle of NFL games through making already highly aggressive players even more so.
Why then the uproar about steroid abuse denigrating the overall legacy of baseball? The shadow of unsubstantiated steroid abuse on Lance Armstrong did not diminish his Tour De France victories for most Americans. Nor did the steroid taint, whether real or imagined, diminish the overall viability of bicycling as a sport. Perhaps this is because it never had any viability as a sport to begin with… I digress.
Many sportswriters have noted that records are more important to baseball’s continuity and legacy than statistics are to the other major sports played in America. They argue that baseball’s history and emphasis on personal achievement within the framework of the team game enhances the overall value of player statistics. Thus, many baseball “purists” such as Bob Costas do not recognize as legitimate the achievements of steroid era players. An asterisk will undoubtedly follow the recorded achievements of players such as Barry Bonds, Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa, Rafael Palmiero, Jason Giambi and lest we forget, Brady Anderson.* (50 homeruns in 1996, yeah right)
But what sportswriters and fans seem to forget is that steroids actually saved the game of baseball in the mid-1990s. The purists who denounce Barry Bonds for his suspected use of steroids forget that baseball suffered record lows in fan attendance following the strike of 1994. Is it any wonder that a proliferation of steroid abuse followed in the wake of a strike that resulted in the cancellation of the World Series? In 1998, McGwire and Sosa were praised as the saviors of baseball as they battled for the single season homerun record. Fans who had left the game because the continuity of play had been broken in 1994 were drawn back into the sport when these two sluggers began to challenge the storied single season homerun record. Players who were hitting 60 and 70 homeruns a season were reestablishing the historical continuity that had been lost in 1994. They drew the nation’s focus onto baseball’s history and in so doing they established a new, statistical legacy. Put simply, steroids brought fans back into the parks through reestablishing a historical connection with past achievements.
Commissioner Bud Selig and other MLB officials claim to have not known about steroid abuse in the late 1990’s and this may well have been the case. However, baseball officials certainly were not looking to stem the renewed interest in the sport that was generated by the game’s sluggers during this era. Whether due to professional negligence or selective reasoning, MLB gave players the green light to use steroids. Now, years later when players like Bonds are breaking baseball’s sacrosanct records, they are chided for tainting the game when in fact they are the generation of ballplayers who saved baseball from cultural irrelevance.
Baseball is a game that weighs heavily on the American consciousness. Many Americans feel that as a game, it represents the uniqueness of the American ethos. How, therefore, can Americans accept the accomplishments of players who may have been cheating? The American people should not accept cheating in baseball or any sport. However, steroid era players whether abusers of performance enhancing drugs or not have played a critical role in reestablishing the game’s cultural viability in the wake of waning public interest. A feat they probably would not have been able to accomplish without the use of performance enhancing drugs.
*Saved professional baseball from cultural irrelevance.
