Baseball's Steroids Era is Mostly Selig's Fault

The credibility of America's national pasttime is in serious trouble. The many eras of baseball history have always been difficult to compare, whether you were talking about the pre-Ruth or post-Ruth time frames, the World War II stretch or the Deadball run in the 1960s . . . Still the fact remained that you could always compare the players within a particular era to one another, and as far as the Hall of Fame was concerned, that was enough to judge the best of every era's bunch.

This trend of self-sustaining eras has come to a crashing halt with Bud Selig's tenure as commissioner, however. Selig has presided over what will now forever be known as the Steroids era, a time in baseball when the lack of rules governing players' use of performance enhancing drugs severely damaged the credibility of a game held sacred for so long by so many.

Science and technology reached a point in the last couple of decades where the realm of sports was no longer safe . . . Human beings---and in this particular case---athletes had reached the point of alteration, which is to say, they could be manipulated into bigger, stronger, faster, more machine-like creatures. And competition in the sports world logically suffered because of it: no longer was the idea of man versus man applicable. It was now man versus man and whatever chemicals he or she was using.

Most sports associations seemed to be aware of this scary trend, if a little behind the curve. The Olympics, the NFL and the NBA all created tougher, more stringent drug-testing programs, and while these policies were far from perfect, they at least sent the message that cheating was not okay, it would not be allowed, and if an athlete was caught, there would be consequences. But baseball's higher-ups either never got the message or just plain didn't care. After all, baseball suffered through a nightmare of a player's strike in 1994 and was doing all it could to win back the bulk of its fan base. The way then-interim Commissioner Selig and his cronies had it figured: what better way to win back baseball's fans than by letting the players have free reign over their physiques? Forget testing these guys, forget checking them at the proverbial door, why not allow them, or more so, encourage them to take down some of the sacred marks of the game for the sake of popularity?

You see, for all his faults as a commissioner, Bud Selig is not a bad businessman. He and his cronies were right about the assaults on the record books: McGwire and Sosa's '98 chase at Maris brought baseball right back to the center of the national sports map. And Bond's '01 run at 73 didn't hurt things much in that regard either.

(On a quick side note, as far as I'm concerned, North Dakota's Roger Maris is still the single season home run champ. His 61 dingers in '61 were the product of talent, hard work and unbelievable focus under heavy media scrutiny and pressure. They had nothing to do with human growth hormone, andro, the "clear" or any of the other performance enhancers science has lofted into our athletic world in recent years.)

But even all-night parties don't last forever: baseball's steroids' bubble has been in a constant state of burst over the past few years as players have gotten blatantly bigger and bulkier to the point where ignorance---from the fans, from the media, from our nation's Congress---was no longer an option. Certainly last March's Congressional testimony fiasco (triggered by Jose Canseco's apparently dead-on claims of widespread steroid use) was a final damning blow. The lid was off the whole shebang: baseball was filled with cheaters, from the top right on down.

So feel free to be angry with Mark McGwire and Barry Bonds. Feel free to call Rafael Palmeiro a liar. Feel free to make the leap of non-doubt on your own. Sure we don't have 100% proof that these guys (amongst many, many others) were using performance enhancers; we will likely never find the evidence to be be so assured. But let's use some common sense here: these guys doubled and tripled in body mass as they got into their late thirties, and that's not even remotely realistic.

When you're focusing your fury and disgust or shedding a tear over what these players have done to our nation's pasttime, do me a favor and make Bud Selig the focus of at least some of that emotion as well. It doesn't matter that he never used a performance enhancer himself; his inept command of the sport in an era that needed toughness and guidance and firm leadership is mainly to blame for the current predicament of the game. Isn't it time for Bud to go now? Wasn't it time for him to go yesterday? Selig's party is long over, folks.


-JAB