The BIG Story

I sometimes accuse other analysts or writers of missing the forest for the trees, but looking back at my columns, one could easy accuse me of the same mistake. I will not deny that I stay away from big stories; the supersaturation of sports programming guarantees that Barry Bonds is not about to suffer from underexposure. Still, there are so only so many ways to repeat that Juan Castro hits a lot of groundballs to second. So today I will go off the deep end and deliver a summary of the biggest baseball stories in recent news cycles.

Steroids

Full disclosure: I watch wrestling. And I do not mean that I will watch for a few minutes if I see WWE on TV. Let’s just say that there is a space reserved on my DVD shelf and on my Monday night schedule for pro wrestling. In other words, steroids are not new or shocking to me in any way. In fact, if you want to read a really provocative account of steroid use, read Paul Solotaroff’s piece “The Power and the Glory” on champion bodybuilder Steve Michalik from The Village Voice. Since I have bypassed the shock and outrage stages of reacting to steroids in baseball, I feel like I have some distance from the subject. On one hand, steroids are incredibly bad for users, especially when taken in the doses that most competitive athletes require. But I think the craziness should stop there: no asterisks, no smug moral condescension, no posturing.

So what do we really know? We can be relatively certain that baseball players- and other professional athletes- will continue to use banned substances including performance enhancing drugs. We can be certain that PED technology will stay ahead of the testing since strong financial incentives exist to create drugs that get by tests and the testers do not even know what they are trying to find. However, we do not know what effect steroids have on the game. It seems reasonable that stronger players would hit the ball harder and farther, creating more offense. It also seems intuitive that pitchers, as Lance Berkman recently asserted, benefit from improved recovery times and better musculature. Other factors like ballparks, differently weighted bats, expansion and better training/medicine all have some effect even if we do not know precisely how much. While we do not know who is using PEDs or what effect they have, players will continue to use them even while passing steroid tests. Banning amphetamines is good, but the social stigma tantamount to a scarlet letter is probably a better deterrent than any suspension length.

Barry Bonds

While I am on the subject, I might as well talk about the most noteworthy player since at least Mark McGwire in ’98. Bonds is a good antihero. Staying with the wrestling motif, he is one of baseball’s all-time great heels, right up there with the Yankees, Roger Clemens and Ty Cobb. Some would say that having someone to hate is almost as good as having someone to love, but I am not sure I would stop there. Bonds is far more compelling as a villain than he could ever be as a fan favorite, so he rightly embraces the role and feeds off of it. I do not want Bonds to break any records, but I think everyone will remember the historical context if he does. I also do not think he has much gas left in the tank, as he is not even pursuing simple medical procedures to prolong his career or improve his season (artificial lubricant in his knees a la Randy Johnson, Keith Foulke and David Wells; bone chip removal from which he could return in a two to three weeks).

As for the McCarthy… I mean Mitchell Commission, it seems unfair to try to reconstruct one player’s steroid history while paying less attention to everyone else. I can understand the motivation though, as Selig needs to both draw closure and make it look like he is taking responsibility. If Bonds broke Aaron’s record without so much as a whisper from the Commissioner, his reputation would be somehow even worse than it already is. I give Selig credit for keeping a tense labor relationship from blocking play for 12 years, for innovating the playoff system, for improving attendance and for saying the right things about steroids. I get the impression that lots of fans reject the Commission just due to Selig’s association with it, and that is not fair. At very least, we should wait until we get results before saying it is a failed endeavor.

Washington Nationals

I think the last paragraph paid sufficient lip service to Bud Selig, and I have nothing good to say about how he has handled the Expos-Nationals dating back to 2002 and the contraction discussion. Since then, the players, fans and officials have been subjected to five years of uncertainty that still remains unresolved. I had a long discussion about the D.C. stadium in general at Baseball Think Factory about a month ago where I argued with almost every other poster about the virtues of building a stadium. A city like D.C. that has budgetary constraints and very real poverty issues extending to a sub-par educational system can ill afford to dump hundreds of millions of dollars on a project that will not help the people who most need it. Baseball is a diversion which we are lucky to be able to enjoy, but it should not take precedence over social issues that implicate people’s lives. But if the stadium had to be built- and some city was going to blow that kind of money- there is no reason to continue delaying the team’s sale weeks, months, and even years.

Florida Marlins

How dumb are the owners of the Marlins? Did the miss that five year cycle of sucking after the first title in 1997 that did not result in a new stadium? Did they think the city would respond more quickly now that D.C. has a team and San Antonio is the closest thing approaching a viable market? I feel for them, playing perpetual second fiddle to a football team, but they have to make the best of their situation rather than blaming the city for marketing a product that is not profitable. I have been to Dolphins Stadium, and I can say that RFK, Shea Stadium and the Metrodome are all appreciably worse places to watch baseball among stadiums I have already attended. I have no first hand experience with Tropicana, Turner, SkyDome, or McAfee (Oakland), but I cannot imagine that any of them are much better, and most of those teams have built competitive franchises without holding their fan bases hostage. Florida built a champion in 2003 with many homegrown players and a few mid-level free agents and I am willing to bet that they turned a profit that season. If they remained dedicated to developing their own cheap talent, they may be a decent franchise year in and year out. There is no way making the franchise a laughingstock makes them more valuable or a better product for baseball fans as consumers. You know what they say about fooling me twice, so anyone who falls for the team after this second dismantling deserves disappointment. Maybe it is not the owners who are so dumb after all.