This week was a monumental one in the history of baseball, and as usual it naturally had something to do with steroids.
First, the Baseball Writers Association of America once again continued their crusade of keeping every single player that has even been remotely tied to steroids out of the Hall of Fame when they voted recently. Mike Piazza, one of the greatest slugging catchers of all time who was never directly tied to PED use was the biggest victim of the writer's piousness over the steroid era in baseball. It was made clear once again that baseball writers want to turn their back on the era of the game that made them relevant and gave them successful jobs and careers, careers they like to protect by keeping "bloggers" and digital based journalists out of the BWAA committee.
Second, the MLB suspended Alex Rodriguez for his part in the Biogenesis scandal. Rodriguez was given a 162 game suspension, likely the end of Rodriguez' quest to chase home run records as he will now be losing a season in his prime.
Further to all of this, Rodriguez has once again been subjected to the morality of the media and fans for his use of PED's. This is the common result of any athlete being tied to doping for performance benefits, as we like to pretend that cheating is not a part of the boyhood games we love.
I am here to tell you that it is a sham. Because we love performance enhancing.
In fact, performance enhancing has led the way to the modern sports landscape as we know it. It is also now a cultural craze.
Even if we forget the simple fact that we as writers and sports fans have supported this modern era of continued moral sacrifice for the pursuit of peak athletic ability by watching more games than ever, and for writers promoting the sports while turning a blind eye. We also need to admit we as a culture are obsessed with performance enhancing ourselves.
Millions of people each day go to the pharmacy and drop hundreds of dollars on the next magic tub of powder to go to the peak of their athletic or aesthetic ability. Creatine to increase muscle mass quickly, protein powders to sustain it, pre workout to get you "amped" and lift more weights to get built quicker. Performance enhancing, but not with HGH and steroids. Yet performance enhancing nonetheless.
So why are we still so obsessed with wagging the finger at athletes who get caught using steroids and HGH to increase their body mass for performance or to rehab an injury?
When the shelf life of our favorite athletes goes from the early 30's to their early 40's as we saw with Rodriguez and fellow now disgraced PED users in Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens and Andy Pettite?
When we see generation defining moments like Ben Johnson's 1988 100 meter gold medal, Lance Armstrong's Tour de France titles, Barry Bonds 73 home runs, over a race where the majority of the talent pool was performance enhancing or was caught performance enhancing are we supposed to pretend those things never happened? Are we supposed to sit and lie to ourselves that it didn't take all of the things we love about sports to achieve those great feats?
Ben Johnson tore himself apart in the gym for those 100 meter times to be achieved as well as perfecting his starts, Lance Armstrong overcame cancer to become the best cyclist in the world and made people care about a sport where people rode bikes in the mountains for long hours early in the morning in the United States. Barry Bonds was one of the best outfielders of all time before steroids and took them to catch up to the rest of the league to tap into his potential as the greatest hitter in baseball history, extending years onto a Hall of Fame career that gave us something to cheer and to talk about.
Nowadays a PED violation is as newsworthy as a DUI arrest or a player injury and the use of performance enhancers to heal injuries and achieve a dream that thousands of athletes each year sacrifice to try to attain is a reality of the modern sports landscape. You can try to fight it, but the PED era is never going away. I am going to stop worrying about who is using what and keep focusing on the moments that remind us all why we love sports, not who is taking which magic pill to get better.
A-Rod may be a cheater, but he isn't much different than the rest of the cheaters that fill our sports world.
In 2014 the line between cheater and hero seems to blur more and more, so why care?
