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Juicers And The Fans Who Love Them

31 Mar 2008 04:33 pm

Over on the Current, I use this rain-soaked Opening Day as an occasion to contemplate why the steroid scandal hasn't prompted large-scale disillusionment among baseball fans.

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It's a good piece overall, and I basically agree, but...

When Chick Gandil and Lefty Williams took thousands from gamblers to throw the '19 Series, or when the Players Union decided that its members' salaries were more important than even playing the 1994 postseason

Come on. The owners and the union both played chicken with the fans. Singling out only the players is silly, and you know better than that.

Posted by DivGuy | April 1, 2008 11:07 AM

I think there WOULD have been much more outrage
from fans if the steroid scandals had happened 25
or 30 years ago. What's changed is, modern baseball fans have come to accept (as football fans have for decades) that their heroes are SUPPOSED to be huge, strong guys, and not ordinary looking schmoes.

That wasn't always the case, to put it mildly. Remember when chunky John Kruk snarled "I ain't an athlete, I'm a baseball player"? A few decades back, there were fat baseball players,
scrawny baseball players, tiny baseball players, and chain-smoking baseball players. Fans looked at Mark Belanger, Freddie Patek or Wilbur Wood and thought "That could be ME out there."

Even before steroids became popular, that was changing. Free agency has made players rich, which means they don't have to get "real" jobs in the off-season as their predecessors often did. They can afford to spend hours in the gym every day, 365 days a year, and the huge contracts in today's game give them great incentive to do so.

I grew up, like John Kruk, seeing "athlete" and "baseball player" as two very different things. Fans younger than myself didn't. To them,
baseball players are serious athletes, as football players always were. They no longer bat an eyelash at a ballplayer with Mr. Olympia
physiques. They EXPECT ballplayers to be muscular and strong, in a way I never did (my old idol, Harmon Killebrew, says Twins management threatened to fine him when he started dabbling with weight training-
they were afraid he'd get "muscle-bound").

Posted by astorian | April 1, 2008 12:15 PM

I also think that fans have become somewhat inured to the medical improvement of athletes. It used to be that if you blew out an ACL, you were done. Now, it's just a matter of rehab. Torn rotator cuff--Tommy John surgery and back on the mound in 18 months. Elbow or knee a little inflamed--how about a shot of cortisone. In other words, it's a fine line between an Andy Pettit taking HGH to aid recovery in the offseason and Curt Schlling getting cortisone shots during the regular season.

Posted by Steven Donegal | April 1, 2008 3:06 PM