Without question, the great American pastime has been polluted over the last decade or so by steroid use. Alex Rodriquez is only the latest legend to fall, joining Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens as the best players of the steroid era to be tarnished. Each are superb, natural talents that would have taken an easy walk to Cooperstown without steroids, with them they became Gods. There are two extremes in the argument of what should be done about these players and their place in history. One is to argue that anyone linked to steroids should be banned for life with their numbers erased and awards returned. Those who lean towards this side are usually former players whose numbers now look diminished or purist historians peeved to see cherished records fall. The other side would ignore the problem completely and reward all these players, whom they would argue, were merely victims of the time. These folks tend to be current players and fans that learn their sports history from ESPN top ten lists and aren't bothered that Barry Bonds defied the aging process by morphing in his late thirties into the greatest hitter ever seen. Any number of arguments are used to justify this stance: The pitchers were doping too! How do we know steroids help that much anyway? Players have always been cheating in baseball! Of course both sides are wrong. The numbers and awards cannot be taken back. The blemish the drug problem has left on the game is also something that will never go away.
Barry Bonds, despite what his numbers say, will never be considered a better hitter than Ted Williams. That alone should be his punishment. Historians will have to judge the steroid era based on what they saw and what they know, not what the numbers are in comparison to the past. Statistics have always made baseball unique. They tell more than statistics from other sports and allow us to compare generation to generation. To be a baseball fan is to be a lover of statistics. However, with or without steroids, it is time to realize that all stats must be looked at relatively. Actually, they have always been looked at relatively. When looking at Ted Williams 521 career homers, one must point out that he missed five years in his prime to serve his country. Joe DiMaggio hit 40 home runs once in his career when he hit 46 in his second big league season, but he did it in a massive Yankee Stadium where a 450 foot drive to left-center could be a fly out. Like DiMaggio, Jim Rice's 46 long-balls in 1978 was his only foray to the 40-homer plateau, but he lead the league in home runs three times and finished in the top 10 seven times. Rafael Palmeiro, with his 600 home runs, never lead the league in any power category (well doubles, once). The days of 500 home runs and 3,000 hits being an absolute, automatic pass to the hall-of-fame are over, and that is a good thing. Baseball statistics are still a unique measure of sports performance, but they must be looked at in the context of the circumstances in which they were accumulated. In reality, this was the case long before Jose Canseco ever injected any needles into anyone's rear end. Now steroid use is just another criteria to look at when evaluating these numbers.
Where the steroid era hurts the game the most is not in the numbers that have been put up, but in our understanding of what we have witnessed over the last 15 years or so. It is easy to look at Mark McGwire's power compared to Mickey Mantle's and say that McGwire's performance was enhanced and Mantle's obviously was not. It gets more difficult when comparing known cheaters to supposedly "clean" stars of the 1990s. It would be nice if decades from now, parents could tell their children that the greatest players they ever saw were not named Bonds, Clemens, and Rodriquez, but Pedro Martinez, Ken Griffey Jr., and Greg Maddux. Of course while it seems obvious that the latter three of those players never juiced, it is really impossible to ever know for sure. No player of the steroid-era escapes suspicion. The more facts that come out, the easier it will be to define baseball at the end of the 20th century, but we will never know everything. Surely there will be some star players, probably even hall of famers who used just as many performance enhancing drugs as the next guy, and yet will never be outed. However it is impossible to bunch all the players from the steroid era together into one group and judge them equally. That would punish those who have done nothing wrong, and thus reward the cheaters. This is why the more names we know the better. As is the case with all crime, some villains will always get away.
Speaking of crime, steroids are nowhere near the worst crime ever committed in baseball. Of course the 1919 'Black Sox' scandal is commonly known amongst baseball fans. These players actually threw a World Series, imagine if that happened today! Still that isn't even the worst crime. For a large chunk of its history, Major League Baseball was a racist institution. Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in 1947, but by no means was the league fully integrated. It wasn't until years after Robinson and the Dodgers bravery that baseball really opened the doors to all the great black talent (the Red Sox were without a black player until 1959). This means that Babe Ruth, Ty Cobb, Walter Johnson, and Cy Young never played against many of the best players in the world. It also means that many of history's best baseball players never got a chance in the big leagues, and have thus been ignored by history. Josh Gibson by all accounts may have been one of the best power hitter of all time, but we have no way to quantify that beyond mythology. Go ahead and ask any average baseball fan to name great baseball players prior to 1950 and they will have no problem listing off enough names to complete a full roster. Next ask them to name as many Negro League stars as they can. There's a good chance they'll be able to count them on one hand, if they can count them at all. At least the players of the steroid era play in an equal opportunity league and without question play with the best talent in the world. What is worse, Roger Clemens' 354 wins with an assist from an illegal drug, or Satchel Paige's mere 28 career wins after not being allowed to join the Major Leagues until he was 42 because he was black? Clemens made a questionable moral decision. There is nothing to question in categorical racism.
In the end steroids will prove to be just another ethical blunder in the game. Baseball will survive not because of its history, but because of its beauty. The beauty of baseball is not found in the numbers 714 and 755. It is not even found in hall of fame speeches or in plagues hanging on a wall. What makes baseball beautiful is a hard slide into second base to break up a double-play. It is a play at the plate in a close game. It is Sandy Koufax in a pitchers duel with Bob Gibson and Mariano Rivera facing David Ortiz with the game on the line and 55,000 fans on their feet. Major League Baseball and the Players Association clearly mishandled the steroid era, but they are finally taking things in the right direction. We can look forward to a cleaner future. Baseball may face bumps in the road again, but it will also see countless moments of pure beauty, beauty that can only be found in one place, the ballpark.
