Yesterday, during a radio interview, I was asked how, from a player’s perspective, the new drug testing policies set forth in the mid 2000’s have impacted the way players think about using PEDs.
For starters, the game is cleaner. It really is. I know that guys popping for PEDs make big news these days, but that’s because there are now rules in place to show just how scandalous these perpetrators are. When things weren’t so strict, it wasn’t such a big deal. Then baseball clamped down on the situation effectively making the matter a serious issue, with serious penalties—funny how the severity of the punishment adds the deviousness of the crime, isn’t it?
Then media realized what a ratings goldmine it is to drag rule breakers through the mud. Everyday, whether you were tired of hearing about it or not, your former hero turned pin cushion got fileted by commentators, analysts, radio hosts, and angry, venting, callers who just wanted to take shots at someone who made more than them.
Those were dirty days, weren’t they? When baseball was like some crime syndicate running drugs behind the polished, public façade of America’s past time. The MLB feds finally got someone on the inside and boom—you needed a bomb shelter to dodge all the falling reputations.
But something else also happened. Some players, most of them members of the old guard, around before the rules came into place, had to pay the price for popping. They walked it out in the public’s eye. The media gave you minute-to-minute updates. Life was so saturated with positive test drama that publicists and agents started to develop anti-venom.
The art of PED apologetics was born. Players learned how to tell fans they messed up, and make it sound genuinely believable. They learned how long it takes to scrub a reputation clean again after it gets tarred and feathered. They learned that in an entertainment driven culture, the difficulty of staying front and center in the public interest is sometimes a good thing.
When the new rules came into effect, it looked as if a player wouldn’t possibly do steroids because the reaction would be social death, and players were terrified. Now, however, they’ve seen the fullness of the process. If you’re eloquent, good with the media, and willing to take your licks you can get away with a positive test and come out better—and richer—for it. You can even spin it to make you look more human, despite being a medically enhanced super human. Hell, write a book about what you learned… It also helps if you keep winning.
Outraged fans are now starting to say things like, “It doesn’t surprise me anymore,” and, “I just assume that any of the good ones are doing something illegal.” It’s sad, but it’s true.
Sadder still is, we continue consuming the sport, while we’re pissed at it.
Oh we have our idealistic solutions that bandage over the ordeal until it’s pushed from the center of our attention:
“Take their money and don’t give it back till their clean!”
Never happen.
“Give it to all the guys who lost out because of player X’s contract built on false success.”
Thanks, Robin Hood.
“Boot them out of the game forever!”
The players union will never allow that. And frankly, superstar talent is hard to find, so don’t expect the MLB to institute something that radical either.
The fans get upset when the see violators, and they have every right to get upset: they’ve been lied too. But then it escalates into something completely useless, this self messaging act of anger and denial that bears no fruit. The perpetuating of a cycle we all know: lashing out against the player like we or have the right punish because we buy tickets. The player does not take kindly to this, he returns fire, something is recorded, YouTube videos are made, children cry, jerseys burn, and some how Skip Bayless finds a way to waste an hour talking over other commentators about it all… Jesus, I need a *vitamin b12 shot* just thinking about it. It’s all sound and fury, but no substance.
Fans want the game cleaned up. Let me amend that: fans want the game cleaned up now that they know it’s dirty. When they didn’t know, they wanted longer homeruns and more of them. They wanted to be entertained. Now they still want to be want to be entertained, but with good, clean fun as agreed upon by current medical testing procedures, and by the drama that comes from people failing them.
Drama is entertaining. News about players breaking our heart, is, sadistically, tragically, entertaining. Punishment is entertaining. The ratings say it is. The talk shows say it is. The trending twitter topics say it is.
Again, fans do want the game cleaned up. But, they also want to be able to bash the sport and the player for not getting clean. Meanwhile they want to say they are responsible for the sport being able to provide riches to elite player. The golden carrot, if you will.
I’m not going to dispute that the game is built for the fans. Obviously it is, they’re the consumer and everyone on the business side of the act makes a buck off fans, whether it be from ticket sales, advertising, or domestic beer in a plastic cup.
This makes fans the muscle of change. If fans want to be it. So, fan, instead of burning one player’s Jersey and then replacing it with another’s, or ranting on a sports radio talk show, Just stop. Stop consuming baseball. At least until it’s clean, or the way you want it to be.
I’m not trying to be a jerk. I do love fans because I am one myself. I’m simply saying that baseball is a business, and in this world of occupy movements and voting with our dollars, we can organize and refrain until we get the business we want.
Baseball doesn’t have to be the billion dollar industry, where watch dogs have rubber teeth, and the parties involved know we want to see amazing feats so they put the best product on the field— most of the time naturally. It can be what we want it to be—honestly clean, or unnaturally entertaining. It adapts to provide the experience we ask it too. So what are we asking from it?
Until fans want purity and accountability as a vast majority when it comes time to put our money where our mouth is, it won’t happen. The bottom line is, we can know about something being wrong, but as long as we’re willing to pay to be entertained by it, it’s not really wrong, is it?
Sure, PED’s may have cheapened the game, but prices are still going up.