 The media frenzy over the Mark Fainaru-Wada-Lance Williams expose on Barry Bonds's steroid use, Game of Shadows, is inane and asinine. Likewise for ESPN's "special report" on Bonds just a week later, and for the full round of allegations levied in Game of Shadows, which hits shelves today. Frankly, the same can be said about the coverage of baseball's steroid controversy for the past few years.
I don't think of this as an example of the desire to "bring down famous or successful people" - although who else is as fun to bring down? Other fans might see it as a cynical attempt to capitalize on Bonds's fame - the story is big because Bonds is the biggest name in baseball. I wouldn't necessarily go along with that in this case either, yet.
My problem is with the puritanism that pervades American sports coverage. It is in love with ideas like the nobility of athletes. It wants to protect the sanctity of competition. And it promotes the fantasy peopled alternatively by Gods and Joes, warriors and everymen.
Baseball writers are especially guilty of this sort of childishness, as if it were solely their responsibility to protect America's pristine pastime. Football always provided easy demons with names like "LT" and "Romo", accompanied by images of limbs snapping and projectile spitting. Track was the same with dark inarticulate beasts like Ben Johns... wait, no one really cares about track on this side of the pond. And cycling, well, no one's ever going to care about that.
But baseball is different. If David Halberstam had his way, baseball would be one long romantic journey through small, slow American towns, through the stoic hearts of men like Ted Williams. In Joe Buck's heaven baseball would be played by robots like Alex Rodriguez, holograms as lifeless and carefully crafted as he is.
Baseball movies are always about boys. Not men, not teenagers... boys. About boys and their fathers, about boys and other boys, and boys who look up at floodlight-shattering homers innocently with starry eyes. The poignancy of "Say it ain't so, Joe!" is provided unrelentingly by the imagined voice of a kid robbed of something precious.
Why is the Little League World Series on ESPN and not pee wee football?
I'm pretty sure that loving baseball is the reason why Bob Costas continues to look like a 13 year-old.
It's time to grow up.
No one with any awareness of how sports is played at a high level should be surprised that performance enhancing drugs are involved. The abject shock traversing through almost all media coverage about drugs indicates a sad lack of awareness on the part of many journalists about the subject they make a living writing about.
Apparently, the story of steroids in baseball started in 1999 when someone spotted a bottle of andro in Mark McGwire's locker. If you had no idea that the "steroid era" had started until that time, you have no business covering baseball.
If you had an idea, but didn't want to think about it until it became painfully obvious that your boyhood fantasies are indeed fantasies, you have no business covering baseball either.
Professional athletes are physically capable of things beyond most of our imaginations. But if someone truly understood a sport, if that person took the effort to be more than merely someone from the outside looking in, he or she should know enough to avoid being aghast at steroids. This hand-to-the-chest, open-mouthed kind of posture we see everytime a big drug story breaks strikes me as fake.
Most people I talk to condemn steroid users as cheaters. Corked bat? "Cheater!" Pine tar? "Cheater!" Other sports have dirty players and cheapshot artists. Baseball has cheaters - a charge that must be squealed in the voice of a 10 year-old. We saw those tears when Sammy Sosa broke his bat in 2003 and when McGwire begged congress to only talk about the future last year. It's time to grow up.
Like they taught us in pre-school, cheaters never prosper. But people do prosper, a lot. But no one wants to talk about that either.
Keith Olbermann invited Jose Canseco onto his show when the Bonds story broke, fully expecting a bitter and petty ex-Surreal Lifer to sing "I told you so!" in English and Spanish. Only no one told Jose, who promptly told Olbermann that the owners and general managers who ignore and silently sanction steroid use, not the players, should be investigated.
Olbermann isn't short on words most of the time, and thank God for that. But this time, it looked like Jose Canseco was the one with the tighter grip on reality.
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