Opinion: Dust-Up, Day Two: O, Where Art Our Game?
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Today’s installment in our week-long Dust-Up debating steroids in baseball grapples over the question: How have they affected the game? Excerpt from Tim Marchman:
[W]ith honorable individual exceptions, people get outraged about steroids not out of concern for athletes or the integrity of the game, but because they’d rather see a more balanced game of baseball. They blame steroids for the death of the 100-stolen base man, the suicide squeeze, and the taut 2-1 pitcher’s duel. This isn’t a generally held opinion -- if it were, baseball teams wouldn’t be making so much money they literally can’t spend all of it -- but it does motivate many of the sniffy traditionalists who get loudest at the mouth about the death of honor and integrity in the sport of Cap Anson, Hal Chase, Joe Jackson and Pete Rose. [...] [S]teroids are just one among many reasons why this is an era of power hitting, and probably not the most important. Smaller ballparks, weight training, thin-handled bats, umpires’ narrow interpretation of the strike zone and juiced baseballs are just a few of the reasons for the explosion in offense. I don’t know if any one of these is more important than the steroid needle, but in concert they certainly are.
Mat Gleason:
Nobody laments the 1988 Reds because baseball meted out a swift, just and eternal punishment upon Pete Rose for his bringing into question the integrity of the sport. We’ll never be able to gauge the tangible impact of PEDs on professional sports. But a strict code of player conduct and absolute punishment can still save us from ever having to wonder whether the whole damn game has been compromised.