Merry Christmas From Sam’s Met’s Blog

I have extracted the worthwhile passages from Jose Conseco’s Juiced: Wild Times, Rampant ‘Roids, Smash Hits and how Baseball got Big, in order to spare my readership from the whole thing. Merry Christmas.

“Mark [McGwire] didn’t like to go out with me because the girls wouldn’t pay attention to him. They would all pay attention to me. That was mostly because of Mark. He was never the best looking guy in the world.”

On being traded from the A’s to the Texas Rangers:
“I also wonder what role the steroid issue might have played in the trade. No one in the A’s organization ever came right out and said it, but by then there were a lot of rumors about me using steroids…
“But the Texas Rangers apparently weren’t worried about that. The managing general partner at that time was George W. Bush, before he was elected governor of Texas. At that time, he was very visible in the role of team owner…Sometimes he’d come down to talk to the great pitcher Nolan Ryan who had the locker over from mine when I first joined the Rangers.
“It was understood by then that teams knew all about steroids in the game. There was no question George W. Bush knew my name was connected with steroids—the story Tom Boswell had written in 1988 wasn’t the last word on the subject—but he decided to make the deal to trade for me anyway.
“And then, not long after I got there, I sat down with Rafael Palmeiro, Juan Gonzalez, and Ivan Rodriguez, and educated them about steroids.
“Soon I was injecting all three of them…Bush and Tom Grieve, the general manager, would have seen all three of those guys getting bigger before their eyes, starting within weeks after I joined the team. But they never made an issue of it, or said anything to me or to any of us about steroids.
“Was I surprised that no one ever brought it up? Come on. You never really get to speak to the owners or the GM on a daily basis. They spend their days off by themselves…I never had any sort of conversation with Bush. I shook his hand and met him once, but that was about it. He was around a lot; you saw him on his way in or out, but always just briefly. We were busy practicing or playing baseball. Bush did gravitate toward Nolan Ryan a bit, probably because he was a legend, and also closer to him in age. He didn’t talk to us Latinos much.”

“I used to use that thing when we would go deep-sea fishing; if we caught a shark, I’d shoot the hell out of it with the Street Sweeper.”

PEDs Do Nothing for the Prose Muscle

Since the Mitchell Report was largely a vindication of Jose Conseco and his book, Juiced, I decided to pick it up and am now 68 pages into it.

If I injected myself with steroids for every time he uses the phrase “It just goes to show you,” I would be bigger than Hulk fucking Hogan.

Clemmens and Pettitte are Scum

At first, I was pretty excited: I’ve had lots of fun at Paul Lo Duca’s expense in the course of this blog and he just got named in the Mitchell Report. Paulie never hit for much power anyway, and I had a lot of quips planned about him asking for his money back.

The Mitchell report is part of a very strange genre of documents that collect stories and evidence of human foibles and fallibility in the form of official reports. In general, the goal of these documents is to eliminate any poignant or poetic relationship to their material, and deal only with firmly establishing facts, and use these facts to lead to pragmatic, defensible prescriptions. Occasionally, as a result of this essential hostility to a personal reality, documents of this sort offer moments that capture the human condition as poignantly as anything in literature. One such moment happens in the Mitchell report, when they quote notes from a discussion by Dodger’s officials regarding Lo Duca:

“Steroids aren't being used anymore on him. Big part of this. Might have some value to trade . . . Florida might have interest.. . . Got off the steroids . . . Took away a lot of hard line drives.. . . Can get comparable value back would consider trading. . . . If you do trade him, will get back on the stuff and try to show you he can have a good year. That's his makeup. Comes to play. Last year of contract, playing for 05.” [italics mine]

I found myself reading that over and over again. There are maybe two or three writers who could do something that good on purpose; create a situation in which two opposing principles were so thoroughly interwoven. It conveys, with beautiful efficiency, Lo Duca’s feistiness and pride, but in a voice that is almost psychopathically clinical. The clinical voice is aware of Lo Duca’s personality and is trying, in its clinical way, to fit him into their clinical plans; Lo Duca’s personality is a factor to be taken into account, either a positive or negative factor in their plans. You realize that, in the eyes of those who control him, Lo Duca is just like the horses that he famously bets on; you get the sense that Lo Duca sees this as well. If I ever saw a passage that strong in a Michael Chabon book, I would assume that he had gotten help from his mommy.

And, in case you missed this, the source here is notes from a meeting of Dodger’s team officials. Anyone who wants to place the blame for steroids on “bad players,” and not the entire managerial and administrative culture of MLB, is completely misinformed.

Except for Clemmens and Pettitte. Fuckers. Cheaters. Hypocrites. Sanctimonious shits. Child-molesters. All-American John Wayne scumbags who were so fucking clean, and so fucking choir boy, and so godamn white and such true Yankees and good guys AND ALL THE TIME THOSE MOTHERFUCKERS WERE CHEATING AS MUCH AS BARRY FUCKING BONDS. Clemmens, who will through a fastball at your head if you look at him funny, was too much of a wimp to inject himself with the ‘roids and had to get someone to do it for him. Yankees. (Clemmens mother died of cancer and it is a big deal for him that he is very sad about…before dieing of cancer she used to turn tricks at a leper colony.)

Scott Schoenewies: Took Steroids, Still Sucked

I guess I feel vindicated. I am fucking infuriated that they signed this guy for three damn years, and let Chad Bradford go because three years was too long of a contract for a relief pitcher: the Mets were Chad Bradford away from a playoff birth.

Gilbert Arenas (whose blog is excellent)feels very strongly that the Marc Ecco/Barry Bonds baseball/ asterisk incident is a travesty for a variety of reasons, some of them valid and some of them unhinged. I pretty much agree; I think that Ecco’s involvement is moralistic, pompous and obnoxious. First off, the thin pretense of making his judgments a popular decision is crummy and degenerate: of his three options, the asterisk is the only one that could ever conceivably be chosen by a popular vote. Shooting something to into space could never appeal to a large enough mass of people: the voters have been told by the baseball establishment, the media, themselves, and even Mark Ecco’s stupid poll that the ball is valuable, they want to keep it on earth—relinquishing it to the void of space would never gather enough popular support. Also, doing nothing to it is not an interesting enough option to get people to vote for it en-mass. Because the poll was conducted by voluntary participants, the only people likely to vote were those who felt that Bonds had tainted the legacy of baseball, and that his ball needed to be marked by an asterisk, to ensure his infamy into the age of the robot ball-player.

The asterisk is fucking stupid. Look, one hundred years after the fact I know that Ty Cobb was a racist motherfucker; I also know that he probably bet on and fixed a game or two; I know this despite the fact that there was no interest or effort made by the baseball establishment or anyone else to keep either of these aspects of Cobb’s history in the public consciousness-- the latter fact was actively suppressed by Commissioner Kennesaw Mountain Landis, who banned all the Black Sox participants for life, in order to avoid the disastrous fallout that would come from the utter disgrace of the best (white) baseball player of all godamn time. I somehow think that people will be able to remember the doubts about Bonds and his record for as long as there is an interest in the sport.

And really, Marc Ecco, how do you see the asterisk functioning? Eons in the future when archaeologists or aliens uncover the Hall of Fame, do you actually imagine some pith-helmet wearing motherfucker picking up the ball and saying “well, other artifacts indicate that this was a baseball, part of a vaguely incoherent game played on a diamond shaped field—however, the presence of the branded on asterisk indicates that the player who hit this ball might have done so with the aid of performance enhancing drugs.” Does this strike you as fucking likely? If that is the scenario that you are preparing for, they should start branding all of Babe Ruth’s bats with a hotdog, just so the future archaeologists will have more insight into our ancient sport. Or are you more thinking: “look, son, that asterisk got on the ball after Marc Ecco bought it and let people vote on the Internet.”

In conclusion, Scott Schoenewies is a crappy pitcher, a fact that was completely unchanged by his taking steroids. This, and several other things, indicates that the relationship between taking steroids and not sucking at baseball is a little more complicated than any idea that can be effectively conveyed by an asterisk.

If Scott Schoenewies feels like proving me wrong and being amazingly damn useful for the Mets next year, I’ll send him a letter of apology.

Steroids, part III

Perhaps one person in fifty or a hundred is endowed with the abilities, both physical and mental, necessary to play baseball or any other sport on a professional level. For the vast majority of people, to watch any professional sport is to watch (and evaluate, criticize, demean, condemn or approve) people doing things, throwing a ball at ninety miles an hour for a strike, throwing an ephus pitch, hitting a ninety-mile an hour ball out of the park, beating the catcher’s throw to second, leaping in the air or flinging one’s self precisely at the ground to catch a fly ball, that they are almost existentially incapable of doing. An enormous part of the appeal of professional sports in a capitalist society is the affirmation that they provide, for the fan, of a hierarchy that is perceived to exist amongst human beings. The fan is on the outside, looking in, watching the few, the privileged and the gifted compete at their games. By enjoying a baseball game, a fan makes a statement that they are ok with both the existence of the hierarchy and also with their place at the bottom of it. By deriving pleasure from the experience of being a ‘have-not’ when it comes to pitching, speed on the base paths, or slugging ability, they are tutoring themselves in how to enjoy being a have-not in regards to other things: money, land, and political power.

A seemingly erroneous perception about steroids is that they threaten the existence of this hierarchy and that ‘just anyone’ who takes steroids will become able to play professional sports. This is quite provably false: firstly, steroids have little effect at all unless they are combined with a rigorous work-out regimen. Furthermore, a close follower of the game will have observed that a player’s innate ability still seems to account for more of their successes or failures than their chemical intake: Guillermo Mota was on steroids at the time, but he still made a crappy pitch in game two that cost the Mets the 2006 NLCS; lots of players have taken steroids, but only Barry Bonds has hit more home runs than anyone else.

Still, the perception exists that steroids have the potential to serve as an equalizer and confer the coveted athletic abilities on ‘just anyone’ and the idea that they have the power to threaten or destroy the hierarchy of natural gifts must be responsible for much of the negative reaction against them, since the affirmation of this hierarchy is much of what draws fans to the game in the first place. The tragedy, of course, is when aspiring players buy into the fallacy-- when ‘just anyone’ actually goes and takes steroids in the vain hope that they will make it will make them a ball player, and finds themselves, at the end of the day, still not a ball player, but beset, nonetheless, with the medical problems that come from using steroids; indeed, it is mainly on behalf of this ‘just anyone’ that MLB is obliged to take drastic action to eliminate steroid use.

It is interesting, in the context of the above observations, to point out that some of the earliest and most widespread use of steroids occurred, with the blessing of the State, on Soviet Olympic teams.

Steroids, part II

Steroid use distinguishes itself from other forms of cheating in baseball, in that it has attracted significantly more attention from both the public and the baseball establishment; as far as I know there has never been a senate committee to investigate ball tampering. It can be argued, of course, that steroid use is more widespread and has had a more significant effect than other forms of cheating—this is clearly supported by the surge in power numbers that began in the late ‘90s and tapered off in the wake of testing. However, part of the reason that steroid use is so widely condemned and has attracted so much interest has to be because people consider tampering with a baseball and tampering with a human body to be infringements of a different order.

The human body was created in god’s image, and to modify it or alter it, to attempt to improve on the divine design, is a significant act of hubris. This same line of thinking is responsible for much of the historical prejudice against medicine, and while few people formulate their thoughts in exactly that way, it is a recognizable component in the reaction against steroids. It is interesting to point out that different alterations on player’s ‘god given’ bodies have almost certainly had a more pervasive effect on the sport than performance enhancing drugs. If the ‘pure’ game of baseball is played by players whose bodies have been completely unmodified, than Tommy John did far more to contaminate the integrity of the sport than Barry Bonds ever could. It is good that Pedro has already put together a Hall of Fame career, because if the medical science were even five years behind what it is now, his career would probably be over; Babe Ruth might have been half a dozen cortisone shots away from eight hundred home runs.

Of course, medical advancements theoretically only restore what had previously existed, at best returning a player to a previous condition, whereas steroids are supposed to improve upon what was already there. Still, if one accepts the premise that players were only meant to be so strong, it is hard to argue that certain players weren’t meant to succumb to career ending injuries.

Steroids, part I

This is the first part of an extended meditation on the use of performance enhancing drugs:

The “opinions and controversy” section of Bob Feller’s wikipedia article reveals two interesting facts about its subject: firstly, that Feller, like Billy Wagner, admits that cheating has been present through out baseball’s history, and himself admits to throwing spiters and scuffing the ball in certain critical situations, and secondly, that Feller is a vocal critic of Barry Bonds and has adamantly stated that he thinks that no steroid cheats should be allowed into the Hall of Fame(of which Feller is the second senior living member), particularly Bonds, Mark McGuire, and Sammy Sosa.

This is, exactly, the problem with people who condemn steroid users for tampering with the integrity of the game: those in the best position to judge, frequently suggest that there was little integrity in the first place. In fact, scuffing a ball was in some ways a more deliberate and dishonest form of cheating, since it was deliberately breaking the clearly stated rules of the game (rules which came into effect after a tampered pitch killed the only person to die playing a professional game of baseball), and MLB’s anti-steroid policies are relatively new, nebulous and evolving. Yet to demand the exclusion of Whity Ford or Bob Feller from the Hall of Fame seems completely unreasonable, and to accept that the mass of ball players experience the fan’s reverence for the game, and are unwilling to look for any edge they can find to advance their careers and earn their livelihood, seems like unreasonable optimism.

Before this goes any further, I would like to state that ‘Sam’s Mets Blog’ is against steroid use, and feels that MLB should take whatever measures are necessary to eliminate, or failing that severely limit, its impact on the game of baseball. The reasons for this are that steroid use is insanely bad for you and if it is present it creates a compulsion for certain players to use, in order to compete against other users. Players should not be in a situation where they stand to gain a significant immediate advantage by sacrificing their long term health, or where doing so seems like the only way to obtain or extend a career playing against other players who had already made that choice. Furthermore, watching steroid users is not more rewarding or enjoyable for a serious fan, and the ‘power game’ that steroid use seems to enable is not the most interesting form of baseball—if steroid use is largely present, it creates a situation where players are poisoning themselves to provide an un enjoyable game, which doesn’t seem to be in anyone’s interests.

However, it is important to understand that the basis for objecting to steroid use more than other forms of cheating is medical and not moral, and that the idea that steroids have contaminated a previously existing integrity is somewhat specious. The integrity was probably not there in the first place; and then again, the idea of a profound honesty, in a game, that in the real politic of people's lives decides and means nothing, is a little bit of an odd one, particularly when people seem more interested in this integrity, of a thing that barely exists, than they are in certain other institutions with a seemingly more immediate effect on their lives.

All-Star Game

bThere are players who play the game and get by largely on the strength of physical skill. Others have more cerebral games, they search for mental edges in the battle between pitcher and hitter, manipulating the count and the strike zone to their advantage.

Rare, however, is the player who is able to keep himself completely focused on the big picture, and use a mind numbing level of strategery to manipulate, not the outcome of individual games, but the course of the entire season-- such a player is Billy Wagner.

What was he thinking when he gave up the decisive two-run homer in last night’s All-Star game? He was thinking “If the Mets play a game 7 in the World Series, I want it to be Jack Kerouac-style: on the road.” Why? Well, the abysmal Scott Shcoenwise hadn’t surrendered an earned run on the road, until the most recent trip. Both Carloses hate hitting at Shea. On the whole, the Mets have a slightly higher winning percentage on the road, than they do at home. And there is speculation that Willy Randolph had a traumatic experience with a cow-bell when he was a child—and the clanging of the cow-bell man evokes a Proustian anguish of memory that impacts his in-game decision making.

So only Wagner’s cunning and guile was able to negate the runs that Reyes and Beltran had recklessly put up, and people whose first reaction was “Well, if we lose game 7 on the road, we’ll have Billy Wagner to thank for it… although chances are we’ll be thinking less about the fucking all-star game, and more about the save he just blew,” are considering the thing only on the meanest, and most rudimentary level—regretfully ignorant of the game of chess transpiring in the back-ground.

My other All-Star game observation is that the commentators seemed to be unusually un-judgmental about steroids, and particularly accepting of Barry Bonds. The sense is, and they almost discussed this openly, that they are sort of preparing for a time, not necessarily in the immediate future, when people are retired and it becomes revealed that god damn everyone in baseball was on steroids in a period that began in the ‘90s and might or might not be ending now. When this time comes, both the sports-media establishment and Major League Baseball do not want to look like complete and utter jack-asses—and want to avoid inquiries into what role the people who made money selling tickets and providing commentary on the home-run races of the ‘90s had in encouraging, implicitly or otherwise, the chemicals that made these races possible.

The baseball establishment has begun to realize that by being shrill about steroids, they are very much like a serpent devouring its own tail. At the end of the day, the only capitol in baseball is the players themselves—not only their accomplishments and records, but also the drama that they provide as human beings. If the current, anti-steroid stance is maintained, revelations of massive steroid use will serve to massively de-value this capitol; and while being moralistic about steroids was fun and sold papers, it is just dawning on them that, at the end of the day, it might put everyone, from the commissioner to the hot-dog vendors, out of a job.

Indeed, baseball is beginning to realize that some sort of re-habilitation of Barry Bonds needs to take place if he is ever going to posses the home-run record. Since Bonds was always antagonistic to the media and kind of a jerk, they thought, until recently, that they could write him off with an asterisk and be done with it. But it is becoming increasingly obvious that Bonds is a symptom of a larger culture and the asterisk placed by his name would reflect on an era of baseball as well. The only way to avoid, probably damning, judgment on the entire era, is to rehabilitate Bonds in the public’s eye: he has already promised A-Rod his support if he ever approaches the record, something that Hank Aaron has denied him; we are inundated with stories of players going to him to discuss hitting; we are shown glimpses of his relationship with Willie Mays.