With many of baseball's biggest names going in front of Congress in recent weeks due to disputes about the accuracy of the Mitchell Report, it begs the question of whether there is a purpose behind all the subpoenas. Why do we care if Roger Clemens did steroids? If true, it was his personal decision. Should we blame Andy Pettitte for trying to resuscitate his career? I don't think so. Do we really need to punish Adam Piatt for doing everything he could to scrounge out a major league career, even if it did involve using performance-enhancing drugs? Probably not.
The fact is, we all probably would have done the same. Take Andy Pettitte, for example, who claims he used steroids in order to rehabilitate his arm and get back in the rotation for a struggling Yankees club. Is what he did any different in principle than injecting a cortisone shot? Besides the fact that steroids are illegal without a valid prescription, Pettitte was essentially accomplishing the same thing as a legal cortisone shot. He was injecting a foreign substance into his body in order to mask the pain of an injury in order to get back on the field.
Pettitte was doing what we want our favorite players to do. We want them to be in the lineup every day or pitching every fifth. We don't want them sitting in the clubhouse whining about an injury and collecting a multi-million dollar paycheck. Pettitte, like Clemens, Piatt and many others, was being a competitor. Baseball and the competition of the sport is all he has known his whole life and to see it slowly slipping away would be hard for anyone to handle.
That is why the fact that Major League Baseball, Congress, the media and the fans are acting surprised about the details of the steroid era might be more mind-boggling than the actual era itself.
Cheating has been a part of baseball since its inception. Players have corked bats, teams have sloped their base lines to aid prolific bunters and pitchers have scuffed baseballs in order to get a leg up on the batter for decades. Put simply, steroids is just the modern-day form of all the other antiquated cheating methods just mentioned.
Once steroids are eliminated from the game, players are not going to stop cheating.
They will just move on to something else. There will be special contact lenses to see pitches and signals, computer chips to detect widespread patterns and earpieces to hear the catcher and get information from scouts all over the field. Baseball and its fans will one day need to deal with these new inventions too.
The real problem with steroids, then, is not the fact that players are using them, because - let's face it - we'd all do the same if it meant getting paid millions to play the game we love, but that steroids are dangerous and can cause serious damage if used improperly. But by making an example of all these famous players, baseball is not deterring youth from using and, in many cases, abusing steroids and HGH. In fact, it is doing the opposite.
"Use steroids and you'll end up like Roger Clemens! You'll be rich and famous with a beautiful wife and a luxurious 50-year retirement." That's the message that is being sent by the steroids witch-hunt, not a message of the importance of educating kids about the dangers of the drugs.
Baseball should not condone steroids, but it needs to come to the realization of the fact that steroids and other forms of cheating will never go away. The best way to address the problem is not from the top down, as it is being handled now, because that just encourages a whole new generation to partake and try not to get caught. The best way to handle the situation is from the bottom up.
Major League Baseball, the National Football League and the media and fans that follow the two main sports of our country cannot ridicule players for getting hurt, to then turn around and disown them for their innate competitive spirit that drives them to use steroids.
Unfortunately, we want our athletes to be as competitive as they can be in every single game, and controversy will always be the result.
