Baseball fans just shrug and keep watching

12/16/07
In the history of baseball, no one had ever hit more than 61 home runs in a season. Between 1998 and 2001, it happened six times. Were we to believe some sort of fitness craze brought that on?
As a baseball fan, it’s hard to see how the recent report on steroids and other illegal drugs in the sport will change much, except to make Roger Clemens’ life a little more unpleasant. But he’s not such a pleasant guy to begin with.
What’s most striking is how little anyone is surprised. Of course performance-enhancing drugs have been enhancing players’ performances lately. Just look at the numbers.
Like the home run totals, in the entirety of baseball history, players’ careers followed a familiar pattern. Top performances in a player’s mid- to late 20s were followed by a plateau for a while and then a steady decline. In recent years, players like Clemens and Barry Bonds enjoyed their best seasons after age 35.
The report brought no shortage of scorn on star players, especially supposed straight arrow-types. Like Andy Pettitte of the Yankees. Isn’t he the guy who’s always going on about Bible study?
It was the Yankees who were hit harder than anyone, with their two pitchers in addition to a number of cogs on their 1996-2000 World Series teams turning up in former Sen. George Mitchell’s report. Clemens, sure, but Chuck Knoblauch and Dave Justice were not expected.
Besides the well-known names, what was most interesting in the report was the multitude of borderline major leaguers who never quite made it big. This is where fans might show some sympathy.
Chris Donnels, for example, was a guy who went up and down between the majors and AAA his whole career. A one-time prospect for the Mets, he amassed about 800 at-bats over an eight-year stretch, never hitting more than four home runs in a season. On six big-league teams, he never caught on for more than a year or two.
How could someone like that not be tempted? The minimum salary in the major leagues at that point was a few hundred thousand dollars a year. And if he could string together a good season or two, there was a chance at a multimillion-dollar payday, and the promise he’d never have to think about money again.
It didn’t happen, but not for lack of trying. The Mitchell report pointed to Donnels along with dozens of other borderline talents, not quite good enough for the big money, but hanging around on the edge. They, not the Pettittes and Clemenses of the world, are the ones who might earn some fan sympathy.
Then there’s the question of tainted performances, and titles won that maybe could have gone somewhere else. As a Mets fan, I couldn’t help but notice a large percentage of players on the 2000 Yankees, the team that beat the Mets to win the World Series that year, showing up in the report. Would they have won without the drugs? Impossible to know, just like it’s impossible to know how many Mets were juicing up at the time. The report was far from comprehensive. But it would have been nice to know.
Those same Mets recently shoved off their catcher of two years, who signed on with a rival and promptly went on the attack and said he couldn’t wait to play his former team 19 times next year. This player, Paul Lo Duca, turned up in the Mitchell report.
Similarly, former MVP Miguel Tejada figured prominently in the report. He was traded the day before it came out. Maybe Lo Duca’s and Tejada’s former teams knew a few things.
But baseball does cherish its records, so it’s hard to see what it will do about the past 15 years or so. All those home runs did leave the yard, after all, and if baseball looked the other way while it happened, cashing in on home run fever, they’re in no place to get mad about it now.
As for the argument that, because pitchers and hitters were both taking drugs that it all evened out somehow, that doesn’t go very far. No one is arguing that every player was on drugs, so naturally the enhanced types could feast on the naturals. The numbers seem to show that was the case.
I wasn’t someone who gave up on baseball after 1994 and the canceled World Series, and I won’t give up on it now. If I can make it through the Great Mets Collapse of ’07, surely I can live with the fact that Lenny Dykstra was a cheater.
But maybe at some point we can stop doing this sort of thing every decade or so. It’s getting old.

Hugh S. Bailey is assistant editorial page editor at the Connecticut Post. You can reach him at 203-330-6233 or via e-mail at hbailey@ctpost.com.