The national sports media is covering the baseball steroids scandal with a carnivorous vengeance. The cover of a recent Sports Illustrated features an amusing graphic: An asterisk superimposed on the drive-in movie screen-sized forehead of Barry Bonds.
The symbolism runs deeper than SI might even realize. Bonds' single-season record of 73 home runs will carry a mental asterisk even after all this blows over.
Which it will.
The steroids scandal will end one of two ways. If baseball's collective bargaining agreement holds up -- as it should; it's legal and binding -- then baseball will gradually institute more severe testing while players who are on the gas hopefully wean themselves off.
If the government manages to unilaterally impose mandatory testing, thus setting a dangerous neo-fascist precedent, then 99 percent of the players will pass the test, including a vast majority of those who use. Human Growth Hormone is undetectable, and chemists such as your good friends at BALCO are coming up with designer performance-enhancing drugs quicker than the feds can come up with tests for them.
By rights, the players should not be tested any more stringently than their CBA calls for. The government has the right to arrest a baseball player caught in possession of illegal steroids. The government does not have the right to police baseball.
That doesn't mean the government won't try. I'm not sure the United States has the right to be in Iraq (a k a the new Vietnam) anymore, but it still is. President Bush needs something to distract the public until he catches Osama bin Laden two weeks before Election Day, and cleaning up baseball is it.
I know, I know: What about the destruction of the competitive balance of baseball? Hey, when does the Yankees' payroll have to urinate in a cup?
More important, what kind of example is being set for the youth of America? What about the children? Let 'em get their own steroids. Better yet, let 'em listen to their parents.
The fans do not have the right to know whether Bonds, Jason Giambi, Gary Sheffield, etc. are using steroids. They do have the right to observe what's going on, then decide whether or not to buy tickets. Their rights do not, by any degree of the imagination, go any further.
The national sports media is guilty of an amazing degree of hypocrisy in its coverage of baseball's steroids scandal. Until the BALCO investigation forced its collective hand, the media largely ignored baseball's ballooning muscles even as it ratcheted up the fervor that accompanied skyrocketing home run totals.
The media unflinchingly bought Mark McGwire's andro smokescreen. Sammy Sosa was always a darling because he shows them pearly whites. Occasionally an ink-stained wretch would vaguely wonder why these guys looked so jacked up, but then Sammy kissed his fingers and all was well.
But then the feds locked onto BALCO. That made it real news. Dour Barry was linked, thus providing the perfect scapegoat/target.
Give the media credit. Once actual reporting and opining was required, everybody showed up locked and loaded. Given that baseball is the preferred sport of those both musty and nostalgic, media members who absurdly still call it the national pastime have defended its purity with great vigor. They may yet get Babe Ruth his records back.
The best thing to do for baseball's credibility would have been to downplay the situation until everyone forgot about it. Comprehensive testing can't be forced. If it somehow is, no one will get caught. In the interim, though, baseball is embarrassed on a daily basis. In the end, nothing will happen.
USA Today took the safe approach. It went after pro wrestling.
McPaper printed the easy truth, which is that an inordinate number of wrestlers have died young because of complications likely arising from abuse of steroids and painkillers. But as wrestler Scott Levy (a k a Raven) said in the article, wrestling is a business where you need to be big and you need to be able to work hurt. If you're not prepared to do both, find another profession.
Like being a big-league baseball home run king. At least you could cut out the painkillers.
I worked in wrestling for nearly a decade. I never saw a boss hand out steroids and/or painkillers at the locker room door. Vince McMahon provides no such service in WWE, either.
But by going after the bastard pseudo-sport, McPaper indulged its social conscience with no repercussions from an angry baseball star, no nasty words from a miffed players' union executive and most important, USA Today baseball correspondents will still get to eat cheap in the ballpark press lounge.
The use of performance-enhancing drugs isn't ruining baseball.
The public relations stain created by a futile, never-ending attempt to eliminate them just might, though. It's just like any other war on drugs. It's not winnable.