SPRING IS UPON US, and with it, another season of hand-wringing over the San Francisco Giants' Barry Bonds, steroids and what the two together symbolize about the downfall of Western civilization.
I respectfully submit that the folks making these arguments haven't thought things through.
Baseball purists contend that steroids give a player an unfair advantage over his contemporaries and, worse, facilitate an artificially enhanced assault on some of the sport's sacred records. Bonds' angriest critics suggest that if the allegations against him are finally proved, his single-season home run record (73) should be expunged. Further, they argue, if Bonds breaks Hank Aaron's career home run record, that achievement should carry an asterisk identifying it as tainted.
Trouble is, the reasoning that underlies such arguments is itself tainted.
The level playing field that supposedly links baseball's past and present is a fiction, given cyclical fluctuations in mound height, ballpark dimensions and such. But more to the point, the ever-advancing science that supports player performance and longevity has evolved to the point where distinctions between treatment and enhancement, maintenance and modification -- even between natural and artificial -- blur to the point of meaninglessness.
Right now, in the same newspapers that contain articles damning steroids and hailing the sanctity of baseball's records, you'll find upbeat features on athletes who have extended and/or enhanced their careers through ulnar collateral ligament reconstruction, better known as "Tommy John surgery." During an hour under the knife, body parts are rearranged, then the player rehabs for a year and presto! -- perhaps an extra decade of useful elbow life. Surely this surgery allows players to mount an "unnatural" assault on baseball's record books, to compile wins and strikeouts long after counterparts from previous generations (Sandy Koufax comes to mind) would've been undone by worn joints? John himself recorded 147 of his 231 career wins after his revolutionary 1974 procedure.
Moreover, pitchers say they throw harder post-operatively. Reliever Billy Koch, who hit the upper 90s with his original-equipment arm, was clocked at 100-plus mph after the surgery. Tellingly, Koch joked to USA Today: "I recommend it to everybody, regardless [of] what your ligament looks like."
