Earlier this week I tuned into the AL Wild Card Tiebreaker (The play-in game before the play-in game) between the Texas Rangers and the Tampa Bay Rays and was preparing to get my MLB Baseball preview ready (ALDS/NLDS predictions at the bottom of the column) before I noticed that Nelson Cruz Jr. of the Rangers was playing and in manager Ron Washington's lineup.
Cruz just happened to be suspended for Major League Baseball games 112-162 for a Performance Enhancing Drug violation. He was returning for the play in game because it was Game 163 of the regular season and if the Rangers won he would be eligible for the playoffs, a long with a handful of other players suspended this season lucky enough to have their suspension time end just as the deadline for playoff rosters hit.
Normally this would be the cause for a great uproar of Hot Sports Takes from the usual suspects. Three hours of discussion on Pardon the Interruption and Around the Horn. Except there was no real outrage, and there shouldn't have been any. In the year 2013 PED's and performance enhancing supplements are as part of sports as the bench press and wind sprints.
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.
We as a culture are infatuated with the potential of our human bodies more than ever since the Cold War. Some of it is superficial, but the culture starts in high school athletics where the letterman jacket has been replaced by the gym bag full of supplements as the way you could most likely spot the next Varsity star of your hometown. 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 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.
MLB Predictions:
National League
Pirates over Cardinals
Dodgers over Atlanta
American League
Tigers over A's
Red Sox over Rays/Indians
