The (Real) Truth

There is a small to fair chance that Barry Bonds could be in a federal prison by the end of this season. As a Giants fan, this is pretty disheartening, because it means a season with Randy Winn anchoring their outfield. However, it’s also disturbing for another reason: Barry Bonds may have done something wrong, but he hardly deserves to be the fall guy for the steroid "crisis” in professional baseball, as if such a thing even existed. But still, in an absolute worst-case scenario, within the course of a couple of years Bonds could complete the slide from being the Greatest Player Who Ever Lived to starting in left field for the Folsom Prison softball team.

Right now Barry exists somewhere in limbo between the two. Anything he accomplishes between now and the end of his career will generate one of two reactions: doubt or abject scorn. He could hit 80 home runs this season, and the reaction would probably be about the same as it is now – because we just don’t know how to respond. Because of Barry and his fellow juicers, statistics - the last solid ground we had to stand on, the measuring stick for past and present players - have become meaningless. Right?

The start of baseball season always brings with it misty-eyed stories about the purity of the game and the regenerative powers of spring training. Buster Olney and Peter Gammons come over the horizon to give us their predictions for the upcoming season, and columnists dust off their yearly “spring training as a metaphor for rebirth” pieces.

But this year a shadow has been cast over the game. A dark, terrifying shadow that has obscured the idyllic “Age of Innocence” we once lived in. Oh, how naïve we were! See, you may not have heard, but apparently there’s some kind of scandal surrounding baseball. I was always under the impression that baseball players were fine, upstanding citizens who didn’t drink or smoke or gamble or cheat on their wives.

Then I found out that Barry Bonds took steroids. Records have become fuzzy, dark has become light, night has turned into day. We don’t know which way is up. Steroids are everywhere, and they are RUINING OUR GAME.

Horseshit.

This is nothing against Lance Williams and Mark Fainaru-Wada, whose book put to rest any final thoughts we might have had that Barry Bonds was a stand-up guy. It also isn’t an endorsement of Bonds, who is by any account an unlikable, manipulative man who uses his talent to distance himself from others rather than draw them to him. He also uses his kids as props to manipulate the media. And yes, he probably knowingly took steroids. However, saying that the revelations of widespread steroid use in baseball cast doubt on the sport’s credibility since the early 1990s is ridiculous, and saying something to the effect of “the curtain has been pulled aside” is just dumb.

The fact is, steroids’ effects are a quantifiable entity, and a relatively minor one at that. It’s just that we don’t have the appropriate tools to quantify them yet. The steroid controversy exposes a glaring weakness in the arguments of baseball purists, because it supposedly damages the statistical equality of a game where the playing field was never entirely level to begin with.

The simple truth is, steroids aren’t that big a deal in the grand scheme of things. It’s disingenuous to use the Bonds-esque argument that “steroids don’t make you a better hitter,” but at the same time to say that steroid use drastically alters a player’s statistical success is cheap and highly dubious. Steroids didn’t destroy a fragile equilibrium in the game where statistics actually reflect how good a player is. They’re no more meaningful than the idiosyncracies of Fenway Park, which probably cause David Ortiz to hit 4 more home runs a year than he would if he played in San Diego.

Park dimensions and steroid use are, in the crudest sense, two of a kind. The fact that one occurs within the rules of the game and the other doesn’t is virtually irrelevant. Sabermetrics is a muddy science; for the most part, we’re forced to operate with the assumption that baseball players hit, pitch and field in a vacuum. Statistics, then, are just our best attempt at quantifying the unquantifiable, namely, “How good is player X?” Steroids introduce another variable into that equation, but they certainly don’t make the whole thing a wash.

Second of all, it’s hard for anyone to claim innocence here. Baseball has never been pure. Like almost every other hallowed American tradition, it is inextricably tainted with racism, corruption, greed, and rule-bending. Baseball’s past actually hurts it, because the game’s unique position in American history gives people a selective memory. People love to remember Babe Ruth’s called shot and Bill Mazeroski circling the bases with joy. However, they tend to forget that internal gambling was a huge problem in professional baseball’s past and that most of the teams were run by evil plutocrats. Oh yeah, and that black players were excluded until 1947.

Baseball has survived more “crises” than people care to remember. Steroids are just the catastrophe of the week, the same way that people love to claim that violent video games are turning Bobby and Jessica into the Children of the Corn when their parents were saying the same thing about rap/R-rated movies/jazz music. Baseball’s history is just as riddled with hollow outrage. People have claimed that everything from interleague play to the wild card to the Pete Rose gambling scandal would ruin baseball, and somehow baseball is still around. Hell, the 1994 players’ strike didn’t ruin it, and if the game’s ceasing to exist for a year didn’t make people give up on it, then casting doubt on a few statistics since 1990 sure as hell won’t.

The truth may not be palatable, but it’s simple: People probably don’t care. Were it not for the incessant whining of Skip Bayless, we would have forgotten most of this by now. People love to feign outrage over their loss of innocence, but the worst crime isn’t cheating – it’s being boring.

Imagine if this debate were over fake breasts. Most guys complain that they prefer real ones, and with good reason: fake boobs are less pleasant to touch and they look gross when their owners get older. As with steroid abusers, any guy who claims he can identify fake and real with 100% accuracy is full of it. But no matter what they’re made of, a big set will always, always get your attention – and that’s all that matters. Barry Bonds may be a cheater, a liar, a drug abuser, a bad father, a philanderer, and a racist. But – and here’s the important part – he hits the ball a really long way. And that isn't bad for baseball.