Better Baseball Through Chemistry: A Generation of Juicers

We pretend we're surprised, were shocked, and demand asterisks next to each of the offenders records--the hell with that. Let's put one big bracket around the entire generation, 1985-2007, and asterisk that.
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We have seen and read and heard the Mitchell Report; seen it and read it and heard it again and again and again. It's much ado, but it is much ado about something. The something is not "who did what, when or where, or to whom." It is not about who permitted, who enabled, who shockingly as it sounds, delivered to us better baseball through chemistry.

The something we should recognize is that all of us, every sports fan, has just lived through the juicer generation--longer careers, more homeruns, and sometimes even lower E.R.A. How dumb we were not to realize that as a result of free agency, baseball players have auctioned themselves off on the basis of past performance. How stupid not to have realized the enormous sums that could be generated by enhanced performances. How stupid not to realize that if ball players could earn millions of dollars more each year by taking a few pills or getting a shot, they might actually do it.

How stupid we were not to realize that if hitters faced juiced up pitchers, they'd want to juice up too. Any pitcher, who's faced Barry Bonds in 2001, had every right to think that he had every right to meet juice with juice, and juice himself up. Fair is fair. For more than twenty years any ball player had the excuse, if he's doing it, why shouldn't I.

Three sources turned over the 89 names to Senator Mitchell, the names of 89 players who juiced up between 1985 and 2007. And that doesn't include the perennial suspects like Mark McGuire and Sammy Sosa. If Mitchell had had thirty sources, he might have wound up with a thousand names. He recommends forgive and forget, let's just move on.

We pretend we're surprised, were shocked, and some demand that we place asterisks next to each of the offenders records--the hell with that. Let's put one big bracket around the entire generation, 1985-2007, and asterisk that. Every record in that generation is tainted.

Who knew what juiced up pitcher struck out what unjuiced batter, and cost him a couple of homeruns. Who knows which clean pitcher had half a run added to his ERA because he was facing juiced up hitters. Who's gonna figure it out--the Elias Sports Bureau? They'd have to cull through every ball game over the past twenty-two years, figure out who was juicing, and who wasn't, measure their statistics against each other, and then add three new stat lines--juicer vs. juicer, juicer vs. clean, clean vs. clean.

Sure, I'd love to know what Barry Bonds hit against Eric Gagne, one juicer against another, or Gary Sheffield against Kevin Brown when they were both on the stuff. And sure, I'd like to compare Bonds batting average against individual pitchers before 2000 and after 2000, but that's idle curiosity. I just want to write it all off, to remember how excited I was when Bonds broke McGuire's record, or Roger Clemens came to New York and pitched even better than he had for the Red Sox three years before. I was seeing better baseball.

Hell, if you want to throw out Barry Bond's numbers, you gotta throw our McGuire's and Sosa's as well. That would mean Roger Maris' "61" is still the all time one year homerun record. Who needs that? Let's relax, let the record stand, listen to Senator Mitchell, call the past twenty years the juice era, and move on. Maybe A-Rod will hit 260 more homeruns over the next ten years, break Bond's record, and give us all better baseball through integrity.

On the other hand, Jim Perry won more than two hundred games, called his biography Me and the Spitter, and nobody ever put an asterisk next to his name in the record books. In baseball, integrity is not a necessarily a virtue.

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