On Performance-Enhancing Musburgers

I think Brent Musburger has said more controversial things about hippies stationed in trees than what he said about steroids. I get it already; it's cheating. That much has been established. But it seems rather obvious at this point that the only way we'll ever have an honest conversation about steroid usage--the only way to prevent every cyclist in the world from cramming his refrigerator with O positive--is to temper our moral outrage and approach it in a rational and scientific manner, something that will never actually happen but is a nice dream nonetheless. That, it seems to me, is largely what Musburger was advocating for, despite his seeming dismissal of journalists under the age of 70 as whippersnappers. Which is just a side effect of consuming too many Bloomin' Onions, whose side effects are no doubt far worse than Clenbuterol.

And while we're at it, why is it that I'm thoroughly convinced Jose Bautista is using some sort of performance-enhancing product, but I would never suspect a dominant pitcher--say a pitcher who threw a postseason no-hitter--of using anything at all? I realize that Roy Halladay looks (and talks) like a CPA, but shouldn't we know better than to judge by appearances? We don't know anything, and we won't know anything until we can stop freaking out over everything.

On The End of Baseball As Metaphor

This is not a post about Mark McGwire and steroids, because, like most of you, I don't really care enough to debate the ethical quandaries of steroid use anymore. This is a post about baseball itself, because all the anger and self-righteousness and backlash to the self-righteousness seems to skim over the real issue here, which is that baseball, having been mismanaged for the past two decades by a gang of dimwitted used car salesmen, has now succeeded in bulldozing its mythology for an entire generation.

This is the meaning of Mark McGwire, and others like him: He demystified a game whose popularity is based in a largely sentimental connection with an "America" that no longer exists. So now all that work Ken Burns put in, all those hours Doris Kearns Goodwin and George Will spent rhapsodizing about Three-Finger Brown and the American character and how the '51 Series is a metaphor for the Korean War, mean absolutely nothing anymore. Without that sentimental connection, the game itself is a diminished product. Baseball, through labor disputes and strikes and the increasingly disenchanting war between the Tri-Lambda moneyball geeks and tobacco-spitting traditionalists,* has essentially degenerated into a regional sport, and if you don't believe me, take a peep at the television ratings: A World Series between the Yankees and the Phillies, two of the media markets that still arouse strong interest, drew a 11.7, which was the highest number since 2004, but barely half of the 1990 numbers.

And I know that there are people who still draw that emotional connection with baseball--on rare occasions, during one of those interminably dramatic playoff games, when Fox deems it wise to cut to the face of every child in Yankee Stadium, I still feel it, too--and there always will be. But there will never be as many as there once were, and they will never be able to argue that baseball captures the Zeitgeist or serves as a metaphor for the American character. Football is America's pastime now--I'd argue that the greatest rivalry of the 00's, eclipsing even the emotional exceptionalism of Red Sox-Yankees, was between a pair of NFL quarterbacks--and anyone who thinks otherwise is delusional. And who can say that in two decades, a generation of kids won't feel more of a connection with soccer than they do with baseball?

The story here is not just about Mark McGwire, or the slow unfurling of the steroid era. The story here is that the only people still gullible enough to buy into the mysticism and folklore of baseball might be Bob Costas and the justices of the Supreme Court.

*As a casual fan, I have no interest in analyzing VORP, or even understanding what it means. Following baseball in the Internet age is like collecting comic books.

On Life in the Fast Lane

I spent this weekend holed up in a fortified compound in Lake George, New York, consuming low-calorie beer and Oreos, interfacing with especially patriotic bears and hurling skeeballs at pontoon-boat captains.* However, I was informed by electronic missive of a number of weird occurrences in the world of sports: Michael Vick signed with the Philadelphia Eagles, thereby offending the delicate sensibilities of a town that considers Cheez Whiz a delicacy; Tiger Woods coughed up a major championship hairball at the hands of a previously unrevealed member of the DHARMA Initiative. And yet here was the strangest moment of all: A Jamaican named Usain Bolt pulverized his own world-record in the 100-meter dash, and everyone agreed that he could actually do much better...

Even though I have never owned a dog, even though I once had my knee punctured by a playful pit bull who mistook me (a jogger) for a milk-bone chew toy, these first two developments can be easily explained: Dogs are viewed by the masses as inherently human creatures, prone to suffering and heartbreak; Tiger Woods is not.

However, what is so shocking about Usain Bolt is that no one can begin to put his accomplishment in context. This is either A.) An incredibly well-thought out doping scheme, or B.) An unfathomable evolutionary leap. Either he has succumbed to human yearnings and (so far) gotten away with it, or he is somehow superhuman. Bolt just shattered his own world record in the 100 meter-dash by 11/100ths of a second, and according to a Canadian sprinter named Donovan Bailey, he still didn't even run a particularly good race. “In Beijing, of all the finalists, he was the worst technically,” Bailey told Christopher Clarey of the New York Times. “He’s improved a lot, but he can still go faster and improve his first 30 meters.” (And yet, even now, he can outrun the Beatles!)**

I mean...what? Is this some kind of collective hallucination? Has Usain Bolt found a way to manipulate the time/space continuum? Has he found a way to advance the science of blood-doping? Or is he merely (and rather suddenly) gifted with the most prolific fast-twitch muscles in the history of mankind? In a world where quarterbacks torture dogs and Tiger Woods loses to strangers, I know I shouldn't be so utterly naive as to believe that this, of all things, is really happening in a vacuum. I do suspect that Usain Bolt is guilty of something, even if it is merely hubris.

Then again, maybe I don't really care.

It is inherently fascinating to watch a man run very fast; Ben Johnson's performance in the 1988 Olympics is still stunning to watch, even if it ushered in an age of moralizing and deceit. Sometimes I think that this is one pursuit that should be driven by scientific experimentation. Even if that's what Usain Bolt is engaged in, we cannot fault him for failing to entertain us. Maybe, in the modern age, humanity doesn't matter at all. Maybe a few fleeting seconds of entertainment is the best we can ask for.

*In truth, I was attending a bachelor party with a rogue gang of music critics, who spent their time debating the relative merits of Pavement drummers and listening to songs like this.
**Or at least the Beatles before they discovered the merits of performance-enhancing drugs.

On the Morality of Chemical Consumption

"You think this country really cares about what ballplayers put in their bodies? If we really care, why are we pumping Coca-Cola in every kid's mouth, and McDonald's, and Burger King and KFC? That (stuff) is killing people."
--Reds' pitcher Bronson Arroyo, to USA Today

So maybe this is where we are today. Maybe we have finally plodded through our denial, and maybe we have vented our anger and completed our bargaining phase and endured a drawn-out depression, and maybe we have finally arrived at the point where we can speak honestly, without fear of recrimination. And maybe we can strip away the artifice and the moral outrage and the equivocation, and maybe we can acknowledge the layers and inherent complexities of the steroid era, and maybe we can all just come clean and let it all go. And maybe the Pirates will win the National League pennant, and maybe Vida Blue will come back to Oakland and win twenty games next season, and maybe Ray Kinsella's father will come strolling out of that cornfield wearing Shoeless Joe Jackson's glove, arm-in-arm with Barry Bonds...

But hey, at least this is something. In an extraordinary interview with USA Today's Bob Nightengale, Bronson Arroyo just kind of laid it all out there; at one point, as Deadspin's Dashiell Bennett points out, he actually utters the extraordinary phrase "I don't give a f---." It is, as far as I can tell, the first semi-rational case for the defense issued by someone who did not hit a home run with his own noggin, and while you can maybe even question's Arroyo's ignorance of one key question--the level-playing-field issue inherent to this argument--you cannot deny that he raises another crucial question, which is: Where do we draw the line with our moral outrage? If every supplement Arroyo takes was legal and sold over-the-counter at the time he took it, how is this somehow more sinister than the bowls of amphetamines that littered NFL locker rooms in the 1970's, or the bootleg Xanax I swallowed on my most recent cross-country flight (thereby permitting me to sleep, thereby permitting me to perform more effectively on my vacation than my fellow passengers), or the fine Colombian (bonus link, as I saw Steely Dan in concert last night) Gary McLain hoovered during the 1985 NCAA tournament*? For that matter, since Arroyo brought it up, here is the composition of McDonald's scrambled eggs:

Pasteurized whole eggs with sodium acid pyrophosphate, citric acid and monosodium phosphate (added to preserve color), nisin (preservative). Prepared with Liquid Margarine: Liquid soybean oil, water, partially hydrogenated soybean oil, salt, hydrogenated cottonseed oil, soy lecithin, mono-and diglycerides, sodium benzoate and potassium sorbate (preservatives), artificial flavor, citric acid, vitamin A palmitate, beta carotene (color).

I don't pretend to know the answers, especially now that I'm nauseous; I haven't eaten a McMuffin since summer day camp in 1982, and while I certainly don't begrudge anyone an occasional fix of monosodium phosphate or freeze-dried hotcakes**, I think Arroyo should be at least be credited for questioning our assumptions, for reminding us, the fan, of our own inherent hypocrisy, and for pointing out that this issue is not as morally clear-cut as we would like it to be.

But then, it never is.

*Interesting things you learn while researching a book about the 1980's, Part XXXII: Less than one year after Len Bias' death from a cocaine overdose, his college coach, Lefty Driesell, said this at a conference in Rhode Island: "I'm a firm believer that if you know how to use cocaine and use it properly, it can make you play better." For obvious reasons, he "clarified" his anti-drug stance shortly after making this statement.
**I am still wondering if my copious consumption of Hot Pockets between the ages of 15-25 will result in the growth of a third eye at age fifty.

(Photo: Michael E. Keating, Cincinnati Enquirer)

On Drugs

Today I will unburden myself, engage in full disclosure, and permit the unvarnished truth to emerge: I am guilty of taking a performance-enhancing substance.

My excuses are manifold; I was in my twenties, and I was single, and perhaps most damning, I lived in Akron, Ohio, a Gomorroah of lawlessness and abundant rubber products. And so when a friend tipped me off to a substance called "creatine," I tried it, presuming that even if it didn't improve my biceps, perhaps it would somehow pump up my medulla oblongata, allowing me to compose brilliant copy about high-school football while working on deadline and thereby enabling me to sign a 10-year, $252-million contract to cover Andover High School for the Boston Globe. I bought this creatine from a shady character who used to hang out at the Summit Mall, wearing a bright-red shirt, dressed as an employee of a flashy front that referred to itself as "General Nutrition Center." Six months later, burdened by guilt and boredom, I gave it up. My performance in every single area of life, as far as I could tell, was exactly the same, though I may have improved slightly at billiards.

Today, despite the enormous toll creatine took on my life,* it remains a legal substance. "Everyone consistently using creatine is making HUGE, AMAZING gains!" claims one bodybuilding website, which also offers me the opportunity to "GET SHREDDED LIKE ABZILLA!"**. Since I am older now, and not particularly interested in shredding myself, I no longer make deals with shopping-mall pushers. But this is what appears to have happened with Rashard Lewis, who took something store-bought and made from wild yams (because everyone knows of the health dangers of farm-raised yams) and is now paying the piper.

Lewis claims he was taking something called DHEA, which supposedly produces testosterone, and happens to be readily available on two full shelves at your neighborhood Vitamin Shoppe. According to experts, it doesn't work particularly well, but it is also perfectly legal, and so I'm not sure why I should care much at all about the fact that Rashard Lewis stimulated the economy with his GNC Gold Card. At this stage, I am like the rest of you, including, I'm guessing, Rashard Lewis himself; I am hopelessly confused. I no longer have any idea what is real and what isn't anymore, and I have no idea what any of these substances do and why some are legal and some aren't, and why some are banned and some aren't--and as usual, this is baseball's fault, because baseball fooled us for so long, because baseball altered our perceptions and broke our trust and wounded us so badly that it eliminated any intelligent and rational and nuanced conversation over these issues, and now many of us struggle to discern the difference between a man who walks into a Vitamin Shoppe and someone who purchases horse tranquilizers from a Bolivian cocaine dealer. If the standard for cheating can be found at the mall, then we are all users; me, you and ABZILLA! are all varying degrees of the same desperate and curious human.

But at least my conscience is clear.

*Which essentially consists of my friend Chuck, whenever the topic arises, referring to me as a "rampant and unapologetic steroid user."
**Little-known fact: ABZILLA! once defeated Moth-Ra without the use of his hands or feet.

On Red Sox Nation

Well, that should just about do it.

Allow me a brief chronology: I first parted ways with baseball in 1994, when they chose to deep-six the World Series out of spite. I came back in 2000, when I moved to a cramped and leaky one-bedroom apartment in Boston, in a neighborhood known as the Fenway. I was close enough to the park that I could hear the crowd from my living-room window, and in the instant it took for the satellite to catch up, I knew that something intriguing was about to transpire on my television set. I was a graduate student, and I was perpetually broke, and I would walk to the gym on Lansdowne Street and purchase a five-dollar Italian sausage for dinner on the way home. The Red Sox were a distraction from my own work, a distraction from my attempts to write and to think and to comprehend a Samuel Beckett novel. Hell, the Red Sox were a Samuel Beckett novel.

And so I became a Red Sox fan, at age 27, for the same reason every vaguely literary soul who moved to Boston became a Red Sox fan back then; because they represented the eternal struggle of mankind. The Red Sox were made up of men like Rich Garces and Trot Nixon and Brian Daubach: They were a collection of likeable but flawed humans, forever nudging a boulder uphill. I pulled for them mostly because I could not help but sympathize with all those people who had bided the past eight decades in search of a single triumph.

And then, of course, not long after I joined up with these desperate souls, it just kind of happened; they stumbled into victory, and they did it behind a pair of (seemingly) guileless goofballs who pounded horsehides onto the Massachusetts Turnpike. And in the wake of that victory, the Red Sox themselves became something completely different; they became, as we are all well aware by now, a trend, a fad, a mainstream movement, an army of sorority girls in pink caps, a subsidiary of the school of fan obnoxiousness. The whole thing always seemed kind of hollow and false, as if their souls had somehow been inhabited by spectral figures who had wandered out of an Iowa cornfield. Now we know why. It is because the Red Sox, like everyone else in the game, sold their soul for victory.

And it doesn't matter that this whole issue is increasingly shrouded in moral relativism, and it doesn't matter that Bill James could very well be right when he says that, in 40-50 years, steroids will be rendered utterly mundane and will be accepted by the mainstream, and that no one will hold much against those who chose to engineer their own bodies. Because if nothing else, the steroid era has already transformed the most charming franchise in baseball into something hulking and unrecognizable. And I'm not sure there is any way of going back.

On Manny

Here's the thing: I actually kind of believe Manny Ramirez. Given the circumstances, I probably shouldn't say this, because its baseball, and there are no surprises anymore. But Manny is, well, Manny. He is the exception to every rule. We've known for quite some time that this dude is utterly inscrutable; ten years ago, I wrote an extensive profile* of him which revealed what we all pretty much knew, even then--Manny is amazingly weird, but he is also completely guileless. All of which makes me think that if Manny had been doing steroids all these years, he wouldn't have been able to keep it a secret from the writers, from his coaches, from the front office.

Manny is the bizarro Alex Rodriguez--he is utterly oblivious as to his image. He does absurd things, but he almost always does them because he doesn't think, because he is not capable of scheming and planning even the contours of his own life. Which is why it makes perfect sense that he would take a medication without checking whether it might be affect a drug test. But I just can't imagine he would even possess the ability to fool everyone around him for years at a time. If it is true, this would potentially be the greatest con since the days of Doyle Lonnegan.

Then again, this is baseball in the 00's. Anything is possible.

*The version I've linked to was rewritten and reprinted by the editors of the Sporting News--therefore, I cannot be held responsible for some of the literary flourishes.

Update: Well, this doesn't look good. Or, to keep with The Sting metaphor:

Your boss is quite a card player, Mr. Kelly; how does he do it?

He cheats.

(Photo: Jeff Chiu/Associated Press)

On the Best News of the Day

So HBO has announced that it is renewing Eastbound and Down, the absurd and crude and bracing television mini-series about a John Rocker facsimile attempting to cope with his own failure. It's odd, because the star, Danny McBride, cannot even throw a baseball without looking like he might sprain several muscles he does not even have--he is the worst cinematic hurler since Wiley Wiggins in Dazed and Confused--and the humor is broad and occasionally ridiculous (the climax of the first season centered around one character literally getting his eye knocked out of his head by a fastball), and yet I would venture to say that this might be the most realistic portrayal of major-league baseball since Jim Bouton's Ball Four. In fact, I could (and will, I guess) make an argument that Kenny Powers, the main character, is the embodiment of the steroids era*, for he is angry and spiteful and disturbingly convinced of his own self-worth (his book-on-tape autobiography is the greatest exercise in egotism since Trump: The Art of the Deal). Here, in the form of a foul-mouthed washed-up relief pitcher, is the greatest representation yet of what baseball has done to itself in the past 15-20 years, and of how the game, in embracing its coarse and insular nature and refusing to address its problems, seems to have completely lost sight of its audience.

Then again, it's also just a damn funny program, and it feels like nothing I've ever seen before. Any show that can introduce with an entirely unsympathetic character and turn him into a cult hero in six episodes must be doing something right.

And with that, I'm f-ing out.

*And he does have a brief dalliance with steroids during Season 1.