The Boys of Summer

Ahhh, what a way to start the new baseball season. A-Rod is juiced. The 250 million dollar man is a product of modern chemistry. Where’s Lee Majors to make sense of all this. Giambi and Pudge Rodriguez already on the list and, be honest now, we all know that the dirty ones greatly outnumber the clean ones. And, like the fabled “Fool on the Hill”, The Kommish, Bud Selig says baseball is doing OK and cleaner than it ever was. Are we going to get more Senate hearings and perjury indictments out of Washington? Frankly, Scarlett…

Let’s take a perverse view of this. Be objective and unemotional. Ask some questions. Is baseball going to clean itself up? There’s only one answer to that…as long as there are millions to be made by superhuman performances, there will be no clean up. Do you believe that Ty Cobb, Babe Ruth or Mickey Mantle were Snow White? Do you really care about whether Behemoth Bonds home run record is tarnished by dope? Worried about the sanctity of records? Get over it. Add an asterisk.

Why do you go to the ballpark? You go for an afternoon in the sunshine, drinking beer and sucking up disgusting hot dogs and nachos. If you are a purist you get some peanuts in the shell. If you are a tot, you get some cotton candy. While you are there, you are entertained by some people performing remarkable athletic feats. If they couldn’t do that, would you still pay thirty bucks for the seat?

If you are still young and athletic yourself, you might watch the moves and attempt that sort of thing in your next office softball game. If you are old and decrepit like me, you tell the guy next to you that you used to be able to do things like that. Then you play the dollar bill game to see who goes for the next beer.

Start by admitting that professional sports are just that. They are major industry entertainment and should not be confused with meaningful athletic competition. You go to be entertained and see something you might not normally experience (excepting a $6 beer, of course.) Let’s forget about trying to eliminate performance enhancing drugs from professional athletics. You can’t.

Don’t convince yourself that major league baseball is some sort of inter-urban competition in which Tampa’s prowess is validated against St. Louis. It isn’t that at all. It is big business. Notice that all of baseball has a “farm system” in which promising players are trained, experienced and culled to rise to the top in their sport. Of course there is one exception. The New York Yankees consider the entire major league structure as their farm system. They simply buy anyone they see as talented and add them to the billion dollar stable. You might even consider money as Steinbrenner’s personal sort of steroid. But, it ain’t about simple athletic competition. It is about putting on an entertainment experience.

You simply can’t stop chemical enhancement in that kind of environment. They will always find a way. We will be impressed by what they do on the field. If their testicles shrivel to the size of split peas and their penis performs like that of an eighty year old man who ran out of Cialis, that is their choice. Madonna doesn’t seem to care—she appears to consider it a challenge.

Keep it out of college games. Keep it out of high schools. Keep it out of the Olympics (fat chance!), but let’s just ignore it in American professional sports. We want to see remarkable. If modern science can produce remarkable, why don’t we let it?

Go A-Rod!