Drugs

The Scold

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Michael Sokolove – New York Times

Those of use who love sports have been dealing with the issue of performance enhancing drugs at least since Jim Bouton wrote Ball Four (that would be 1970). This is important because the Dick Pound fueled hysteria over the past few years has actually done some good (there has been plenty of attention paid to figuring out how to implement testing regimens) and some bad (like even when certain athletes test as clean they’re tarred with the PED brush).

In this story (which I believe will be available to NY Times subscribers only come Tuesday or Wednesday) Michael Sokolove profiles Pound, explains why he is the way he is, explains why his quest is quixotic, and does a fair job of laying out the path to the future of sport.

Essentially, people with like chemistry will compete against one another. There will be levels based on chemical compositions and ratios, and if you’re a PED taker or a freak of nature, your actual chemistry is what will matter.

I’m confident to predict that when this comes true, the big money league will be the one in which the athletes run the fastests, jump the farthest, hit the ball hardest. Everything else will be minor league.

Athletes’ unbeatable foe

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Credit the Los Angeles Times

Regular visitors know that my problem with anti-steroids and PED rules is that they’re impossible to administer fairly, and fly in the face of the self interest of almost everyone involved (that is, we like extraordinary athletes, athletes like to win, and they are paid to be better than everyone else).

This LA Times series doesn’t convince me of the credibility of all its witnesses, but it clearly shows the problems with the present testing procedures.

Needless to say, if you can’t trust the tests, then what’s the prototcol for?

Shameless pursuit – Cycling –

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Yahoo! Sports


“It is possible that in a sport overloaded with cheats Armstrong overcame cancer and utterly dominated for seven years, but is it really probable?”

It has come to this. If you’re tested and come up positive you are a immoral lout, a cheat, a disgrace. And if you’re tested and come up negative you must have come up with a way to beat the test.

The crisis here, as Wetzel actual gets to after a while, is one of the nature of sports and competition. It’s hard to see bicycling as more corrupt than any other, but maybe the physical pressures caused the many to turn to PEDs first.

In any case, with the IOC now looking to ban those tents that simulate high-altitude conditions endurance athletes use for training, but not high-altitude training itself, the contradictions are starting to come to a head.

Somehow calling athletes who cheat immoral seems way beside the point.

Baseball Musings:

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SI’s Luft on Grimsley

David Pinto goes to the place I think all discussion about PEDs has to go, but in a comment far down the page Keith Levenberg takes it one step further. Well worth reading down the page if you have set ideas about drugs and the games.
I was going to link to Deadspin’s sober speculation of the contents of the redacted information in the Grimsley affadavit (about him, not by him), but the link from the affidavit to Albert Pujols’ trainer, Chris Mihfield, is too tenuous. Anyone who has hung around with professional athletes in the last 20 some odd years (and probably longer) knows that all follow the supplements, vitamins, and enhancement products to some extent. Mihfield recommending a guy to Grimsley who had bennies is a far cry from a smoking gun pointing at Pujols.

But then I think we need a lot less hysteria.

LaRoche’s disorder in spotlight

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Newsday.com

Adam LaRoche’s problem, apparently, is ADD. He won’t take medication for it, however, or make excuses, which is why he sometimes looks like he isn’t paying attention to the game. Or he doesn’t hustle, as in a play in Monday’s game against the Nats. According to the experts quoted in this story, if LaRoche took the right medication he’d be a better baseball player. But there are a lot of people these days who say that taking the ADD medication helps them focus better, too, even if they haven’t been diagnosed with the disease. Since LaRoche can function on the extraordinary level of a major leaguer without taking medication, can his disease be bad enough that he should be allowed performance enhancing drugs his teammates and opponents aren’t allowed?

I’m just asking.

No Record, No Foul: There’s No Need to Salute Bonds

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Murray Chass – New York Times

Chass is too often interested in oddball ephemera (most AB without a HR in a season, for one) and less than exciting inside information, while abjuring the trade rumors and the real inside baseball scuttlebutt we crave and he would seem to have at his disposal daily, to be interesting. But he’s a very nice writer and he clearly lives in some odd Timesean baseball universe that, like the NY Times itself, is a little too insulated from the hatred it inspires, but is admirable for its stubborn embrace of staunch liberal values, no matter how mutable they end up being.

This Chass story quite correctly and pedantically points out that MLB not honoring Barry Bonds for passing Babe Ruth is quite correct, because passing Ruth is not a record. Barry has (when it happens) simply moved up the list. But in this same story he also conducts a rather spurious survey of Bonds career that indicts him for hitting more homers than anyone else after he was 37. The fact that he did this (hit so many more homers than Ruth or Aaron or Mays) is Chass’s evidence that Bonds used steroids, which then improved his performance, which put him in the position, this week, to become the second most prolific home run hitters of all time.

This is crap because:

Stats aren’t really comparable across eras. The context in which they were created is constantly changing, and it is a romantic illusion to think that the records themselves confer some sort of grandeur. Stats should always be judged in the context of when they were created.
We don’t know what effect steroids have had, and it’s certainly possible that Bonds got extra years out of his career because of whatever drugs he took. It’s possible he got stronger and hit more homers because of drugs. But he’s never tested positive for a banned substance, and others have, so to attribute all the gain to him is misleading, at the very least.

And, most obviously, just because someone does something that hasn’t been done before doesn’t convict him. Could be. I think Barry juiced in some way. I’m not happy about that, but it has to be dealt with. Maybe the George Mitchell commission will give us some way to measure the context in all this, I hope so. But the bottom line is we pay our athletes to perform at peak value every day.

When they don’t we boo them. To think that whatever drug use there is hasn’t been sanctioned by our failure to make rules and our demand for impovement is dopey. So let’s make rules and enforce them. Let’s continue to consider context when considering whether a player is the greatest of all time.

But let’s not be stupid about our moralizing. Athletics are about performance, and it’s absurd to think that competitors wouldn’t use every means necessary to win, if they thought they could get away with it. And it would be hyper-hypocritical to call them on it as if they shouldn’t have.