This San Francisco Chronicle article reports that Barry Bonds, one of the best baseball players of all-time, admitted to a grand jury that he had taken steroids and human growth hormone.
The typical media reaction to this development will be self-righteous outrage, but I find my reaction to be one of sadness. I mean, how sad is it that one of baseball’s all-time greats resorted to illegal and dangerous drugs to enhance his career? Well, probably about as sad as the fact that supposedly secret grand jury testimony ends up on the front page of the local paper. Even sadder (and not even mentioned by the mainstream media) is that there is no study that has been done to date that indicates there is any competitive advantage to be gained by use of anabolic steroids in baseball. In other words, it is clearly cheating, but it may not actually enhance performance even though Bonds’ career statistics may be anecdotal evidence of enhancement.
Also lost in the media firestorm over the revelations about Bonds is the even sadder stories of Jason Giambi, the former MVP who now has serious health issues that are likely a result of his steroid use and of his brother Jeremy, who has also admitted to using steroids but whose baseball performance has eroded dramatically while he has been taking them. Consequently, apart from the mainstream media’s drumbeat to implicate the stars with steoroids, the real substantive story here may be that using steroids is unrelated to top-tier performance in baseball. At very least, the net effect of baseball players using steroids remains decidedly unclear.
The bottom line on all of this is that professional sports in general, and Major League Baseball in particular, has not done a good job of drawing the line with regard to what should constitute illegal use of drugs and other alleged performance enhancing substances. As a result, the league rules (as well as our nation’s laws) governing which substances are legal and illegal are often arbitrary and hypocritical. Indeed, the libertarian part of me tends toward the position that true freedom means that professional athletes are ultimately responsible for their physical condition and that they should assess the risks and costs of such activities themselves.
Moreover, professional sports teams (as well as their fans) often encourage their players to risk their health. Players who “play with pain” are the subject of adulation in all levels of sport, as are players who risk injury by running into walls, taking cortisone shots to be able to perform with reduced pain (see Roy Oswalt this season), and undergoing risky surgeries to lessen pain in order to play in a big game (see Curt Schilling in the World Series).
Consequently, the difference between a ballplayer taking pain-reducing drugs to get through a season and a slugger using performance enhancing drugs in an attempt to be more productive is not as wide as it may appear on first glance.
If cooler heads prevail, professional sports should address this public relations fiasco by commissioning a study that would determine in a clinical fashion the impact, if any, that steroid use has on athletic performance. Then, in a manner that is sensitive to the rights of all parties involved, Major League Baseball should use the findings of the clinical research to establish a clear regulatory system governing the use of all types of performance enhancing drugs. Perhaps then the mainstream media would even begin to address the issues in a balanced manner rather than the inflammatory style that it currently uses on the subject to sell newspapers.
As to the possibility of this mess being handled in such a manner? Next to zilch. So it goes.