I had planned on devoting my morning to studying and working on my statistics homework, but while eating breakfast this morning, I made the mistake of reading Lee Klein’s “All Aboard the Bloated Boat: Arguments in Favor of Barry Bonds.” Lee Klein is a talented and intelligent writer, but his arguments infuriated me.
One of them was that Barry Bonds is being punished for being a great baseball player who dared to dream of becoming a legend. “And it was this drive to be baseball’s best - not just of his era, but of all time - that may have compelled him to take a legal substance, widely used by power hitters and pitchers alike, on which he began to compete more with history than with contemporaries who once walked him 232 times in one season. He was that good.” (Klein, 229) Klein appears to be impressed that Bonds is so good, that by using steroids, he can break records. Wow, that good, eh? So good that by taking steroids, he can hit more home runs than pro players not using drugs? I am more than willing to admit that I know very little about the history of baseball and how rampant drug use is among professional players. My interest in baseball so far is mostly limited to the Dodgers, and this interest began the summer of 2006 after my dinner date with Jason when Johann checked his Blackberry and informed me to “go fuck [myself] because [my] fucking Dodgers won” (for those of you unfamiliar with Johann, most of my conversations with him have continued along that exact same line and he has become a dear friend). Although my interest in baseball is limited and recent, I do not believe that every single professional MLB player with any talent at all is using steroids, as Klein implies. Klein goes on to say that if any of us took steroids, we could never be that good. NO ONE DOUBTS THIS, and no one has claimed otherwise. I think if players like Ken Griffey, Jr., were on drugs, he could have surpassed Bonds’ talent - that is what I don’t like about Bonds’ steroid abuse. Enlighten me here: when Klein says that Bonds is using a legal substance, does he mean that it is legally obtained, or that it is legal to use to enhance your performance in professional baseball? If it were legal to use this substance to enhance your performance during MLB games, then what is the brou-ha-ha all about? And why doesn’t everyone use it? Many players are good, unbelievably good, and I do not doubt that they dream of making history with their abilities, but they have the integrity to stick to a more natural talent. It is not fair to say that Bonds is the only one with enormous pressure to do well (Klein states this earlier in the article - devotes pages to this, actually). Bonds is not the only player with unusual talent, and it is not fair for him to make history without relying on this talent alone, the way that other players are.
Another argument was the oft-used, never appropriate (IMHO): “bad things are happening in the world, and people who care about the integrity of sports are conspirators trying to take the attention off of the world’s more pressing problems.” Yes, bad things are happening in the world, but questioning the integrity and fairness of using performance-enhancing drugs in a professional sport is not a conspiracy theory to mask inflating gas prices and the housing crisis. One of the beautiful things about sports is that we have some measure of control in making things fair, and balancing the playing field. We can set up rules and regulations to achieve some measure of equality (this is also one of the founding beliefs of our great nation). Sports is one way in which people can demonstrate and present their talent we enjoy seeing on display. I, personally, think of it as athletic evolution. It is quite exciting to see what the human body is capable of achieving. Banning steroids as one method is one such way of preserving the beauty of the game (and this belief I have that baseball players have a natural talent to accomplish something amazing). Anyway, there are bad things happening in the world, and I hope people are not ignoring them, but if we can prevent bad things from happening in the beautiful world of sports, then let’s not let sports be one area in which bad things are happening. Cheating is cheating, and everyone is NOT doing it, so let’s punish the ones that are blatantly ignoring rules that have been set in place for clear reasons.
The main argument appeared to be that everyone is on drugs if they have ever consumed anything non-organic, so Bonds is actually the poster boy of the American way. We should care more about these hormones instead of Bonds’ steroid use. The very first counter-argument in my mind is that: Consuming non-organic produce is not illegal, but Bonds’ actions were/are illegal, so this is a terrible comparison. It’s more of a lack of a comparison. Klein makes other ridiculous statements, like: the Beatles used drugs beginning with the Rubber Soul album, so if you like that album, or any of their albums after that one, you have to burn them if you think drugs are bad. I don’t understand why Klein accuses us of hypocrisy for focusing on cheating in the world of professional sports. He calls this a benign crime, but I don’t think it’s benign to other professional ball players. Klein also says that in a world with added hormones, why are we surprised that a ball player is trying to bloat his talent the same way that we bloat ourselves? There are a million counter-arguments to these arguments, but I am not versed in philosophical names for bad arguments. Anyway, I don’t think cheating in sports is the American ideal. I think most of what we do is with the intent of promoting equality, usually with the mistake of overdoing it.
All right, I am exhausted now: conclusion to follow later.
