In terms of subjects I would normally consider to be in the gray area of what is appropriate to discuss in this blog include that of race. Yet a number of mainstream columnists make this a common theme in their writings, including Bryan Burwell of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and Jason Whitlock of the Kansas City Star.
Since blogging by nature is often about commenting about what others are commenting about, I feel I must call attention to a pair of articles that are running on FoxSports.com written by Whitlock.
Looking for a fresh angle and someone new to blame for the steroids mess in sports, Whitlock lays a claim that is even wild coming from him:
“…the steroid epidemic was sparked by white athletes trying to keep pace with black athletes.”
The first article presents the idea amid an embarrassing wreckage of seemingly random thoughts. After some 2000 reader comments along with who knows how many additional notes sent to his personal email address, his follow-on article attempts to explain. While the second is more focused than the first, that fundamental assertion ties the two together.
Whitlock came to his conclusion by referencing his own experiences as a high school and college football player, a world in which he thinks whites and blacks alike bought into the “myth” that blacks were the athletically superior group. The use of the word “myth” is Whitlock’s own as this most basic point in his case is one the author states he personally does not believe.
The line of thinking goes on to assert that the families and coaches, predominately white, explicitly or implicitly encouraged steroid use and because of it, the majority of steroid users in the 1970s and 1980s were white. Whitlock believes this to have been pervasive in America simply because it is what he saw in his own town and college.
Only by the 1990s did the epidemic apparently become “colorless” in Whitlock’s words, yet the writer does not explain what caused it to encompass all races, nor does he provide any supporting data.
There is a huge Rose Mary Woods-like 18-½ minute gap in Whitlock’s story as to how the suspected moves of paranoid whites in the suburbs eventually managed to consume all of sports. He offers no hard or even spongy evidence of proof whatsoever, just his personal opinions.
For example, he did not speculate as to what drove the most prominent athletes in the granddaddy of all steroids scandals, BALCO, to use.
I am referring to Marion Jones, Tim Montgomery and of course, the most controversial of all, Barry Bonds, all black. As top individuals in their sports, track and field and baseball respectively, why did they start?
I can fill in the blank. It is all about the quest for money and fame and trying to figure out any edge possible over the next guy or gal who is after the exact same thing.
It has nothing to do with race and everything to do with THE race.
Whitlock offers his fix, if you want to call it that.
“The beginning of a solution remains the same. Pressure needs to be applied to coaches at the high school and college levels and coaches, management and ownership at the professional level,” the writer naively suggests.
Hasn’t he ever heard of the MLBPA and their peers? Does he not understand professional athletes of all types today have a level of independence that puts them above lecturing from coaches and team officials?
Still, steroids education in the schools and in the NCAA has come a long way since Whitlock suited up. Exactly what more in terms of awareness can and should be done at those levels?
As I see it, the best chance for steroid deterrence is through stronger testing and penalties which require the cooperation of all parties to be put in place. This needs to be a common and constant agenda in all of sports at all levels, as the target is continually moving.
Bottom line, how does the supposed origin of the problem having been race-driven 30 years ago have anything to do with Whitlock’s solution offered today? Exactly what purpose did playing the poorly-presented race card serve, anyway?
Like so many unsuccessfully trying to deal with complex issues, Whitlock simply reverts to what he does best in trying to make this black and white.
I read the headline and my first guess was this must be about something Whitlock wrote. I’ll comment more after I read the articles.
One root of the PED kerfuffle is the difficult history of labor relations in baseball. Owners and the union have been through several strikes. There is a contract between the two, and issues seem to be negotiated sometimes with a great deal of difficulty or mutual suspicion.
Decades ago, if so inclined, ownership might have been able to unilaterally impose a PED testing regieme. IIRC, ownership banned some hormones circa 1991. A testing regieme was probably delayed a long time by the union. Why? It would have been viewed as invasion of personal privacy and liable to be fraught with errors and unfairnesses. There was little incentive for the Union to want such a thing.
In the last decade, however, the pendulum has probably swung and players themselves may need a testing regieme to defend their reputations in today’s lively, low-fact atmosphere of allegations against athletes. If an athlete is successful, someone will write that he/she is a cheater. At least, in a few sports, notably baseball.
Thus…..Whitlock blaming owners and rich Bud Selig from profiting from the system seems off-the-mark.
Miguel Tejada recently pled guilty to not helping investigators who asked him questions about PED use by a team-mate. (Maybe the team-mate told investigators he had spoken with Tejada?)
In his court appearance, Tejada was served by a translator. He was asked and testified that he had not been educated higher than 8th grade. Unsurprising. He grew up dirt poor in the Dominican, where Spanish is spoken, and educational opportunities may be limited.
Much of what Tejada has learned as an adult has been within baseball. Baseball values team-play.
What has come to pass? Tejada has literally been convicted for not ratting out a team-mate, one of the values he has been taught.
It is also said Tejada obtained a lot of HGH and said he did not use it. This makes Tejada seem like a dopey liar. However, the issue is complicated, because the transgression may be acquiring HGH from a non-authorized distribution source. The evil transgression is Tejada did not get his hormone from an authorized distributor.
Baseball players can probably get all the HGH they want, if they find a sympathetic doctor who prescribes it for them; buy HGH through an authorized pharmacy; and register with MLB that they are taking HGH for medical reasons, so if they show up with high HGH in a urine test, it is not a transgression.
Whether a player gets HGH from some unauthorized distributor or from a doctor/pharmacy, the biological gains of HGH supplements will be the same. Players just need to go through the authorized path, so their names are not dragged out into the sports pages.
While I will not say this episode links well to Whitlock’s articles, there is a lot of screwy stuff within the field of PED reporting. Tejada seems to have been convicted for the enormous crimes of not ratting on a team-mate and for buying his HGH not from the right, authorized route.
Good grief! Well, I guess the steroids worked so well that the white ballplayers improved to the point where blacks hardly even want to go into professional baseball anymore. I mean compare it to any other major sport–except hockey–or golf–or cycling–or swimming–or tennis–or, or…. What was Whitlock’s point again?
In one article, Whitlock asks a good question, even if I do not find his answer persuasive. He asks why steroids matter to baseball fans, whereas they are an irrelevant snooze for football fans.
His answer is Ruth’s home run record. I believe this opinion is a bit off the mark.
I instead suggest it is the 61 HR mark in a season by Roger Maris. This was broken by McGwire and Sosa, at the same time, after Roger reigned supreme for a long time. Then Mark and Sammy were beaten by Barry Bonds, then about 36. And it was their ages during the peak years of McGwire and Bonds that imply they had gained strength in new ways. There was a strong implication that baseball players were gaining strength or at least not losing prowess that suggested something was going on that was not in compliance with the toothless prohibition of 1991. Athletes are smart and competitive, so many were taking advantage of muscular gains or preservation that were likely not available in the era of Maris.
Football has resemblences to gladiator contests. Many are injured and do not enjoy long careers. This may mean fans celebrate whatever players accomplish and do not begrudge them using PEDs. Or, maybe football fans care mostly about the season before them, whereas some baseball fans think of baseball history and make Top 40 lists of the greats. Or, maybe baseball is seen as a game of skill, whereas football more brute force, so football fans do not begrudge players bulking up so as to compete with maximum force.
To sum up, Whitlock asks a good question, but his answer seems off. He is a spirited writer.
In his second article, Whitlock makes a point that seems credible to me. He claims that PEDs began especially in suburban schools (and he simplifies this to mean among white kids).
This seems plausible, if we consider that knowledge of PED science issues could become common first among relatively well-to-do schools. In a lot of cities, competitive sports programs have been poorly funded. Kids are fortunate to have games and equipment. They may not have comparable access to gyms and weight-lifting equipment and programs, as in suburbs. PED use will have spread in tandem with body-building programs more widely available in suburbs.
Whitlock’s view that PED use has been common and no big deal in amateur football is also plausible to me. Football players and coaches are competitive, playing a competitive sport, they want to win.
So even though there are aspects of Whitlock essays that seem poorly reasoned, beneath the style and some unpersuasive ideas, there may be some valid points, too.
If white folks have recently and truly been worried about protecting the HR record of Babe Ruth, then why didn’t they care when Hank Aaron bested Ruth? Its Aaron who held the career HR record surpassed by Bonds, not Ruth.
Whitlock tries to get around this difficulty, on the rationale Hank is humble (so he must have accomplished his feat by being invisible to white folks), whereas Barry is less acceptable and more threatening. This could be said to argue Henry Aaron is not an African American. As well as nuts, this is disrespectful to a wonderful gent.
Maybe the real distinction between Barry and Hank is Hank did not get hormone supplements. IIRC, Aaron never hit more than 45 HRs in a season. He was durable and played steadily for a long time.
Aaron’s career high in home runs was 47 in 1971 at age 37. Hmm, a late power surge. Bonds was only 36 when he “creamed” his 73.
1. The only one I ever heard put a racial tone on the HR race were Bonds and Whitlock.
2. Is PEDs a racial issue in football also?
3. The first time I’ve ever hear “spirited” used to mean “race obsessed”.
4. Even though I don’t agree with Whitlock often i admire him for not holding back what he feels.
5. Tejada may have been conforming with his cultural norms but our laws are here to protect our cultural norms.
6. We don’t know whether Aaron used PEDs or not.
7. I wonder if McGwire might have shown at Spring Training this year but backed out due to the latest contraversy.
5. Reportedly there are lots of native born US citizens who buy HGH sold as an elixir of youth via the Internet.
7. No, I don’t think so. McGwire had told TLR “no” several months ago, according to the NY Times article I quoted when TLR was encouraging Mac to speak out.
My guess, and this is just a guess, if any current events affected McGwire’s 2009 decision to remain in seclusion, it would have been brother Jay’s book.
3. and 4. It is interesting for Whitlock to look at the issue from racial perspectives. However, I dont think this yielded much. Yet he has some backbone to follow his thought process, to where-ever it leads him.
I sense Whitlock himself played football. From this, he is probably onto a plausible point about PEDs being rampant in football and this began mostly in suburban high schools. Since amateur baseball in the US is mostly suburban, you would have the same kids playing football in the autumn and baseball in the spring, building their bodies by all means at their disposal.
Kids and their parents who guide them get to make their own choices in life, as we all do, for which they are responsible. They are not forced to emulate a ML baseball player, either for good or ill. I did not seek out cocaine, despite a few baseball players snorting it in the 1970s and 1980s, or jazz musicians in the 1940s/50s. I can still respect the achievements of a baller or a musician, without having to copy them in everything.
One big change from halycon baseball days of yore and lore — today’s players live in more of a fishbowl that is highly critical. If something is found out about a sports figure today, it is written about by columnists and spread far and wide via the internet. Every mistake or even appearance of a possible mistake or many an untrue rumor is magnified.
On the subject of your last paragraph, Jumbo, TLR made a statement in 2005 that Goold re-published that I think is most appropriate. The game of baseball, including owners, union, coaches and the players themselves, collectively blew their chance to deal with the problem before it got out of control.
To me, that is the most accurate assessment of blame, for those who feel the need to go there.
“This is a real high-profile situation — because it’s illegal, because it has some serious health effects — but it could have been handled within the baseball family. I think way back when it was first identified maybe we could have done something to stop it. We should have done something to stop it. But now it’s gone beyond the chance of us doing anything within baseball. Know why? Because we didn’t take care of it.”
The explanation for Aaron’s late home run surge is two-fold.
1) Most of his career was spent in Milwaukee’s spacious stadium which supressed homers; his final years were spent in the launching pad that was Atlanta Fulton County stadium, and,
2) Once he got within reach of Ruth, he started swinging for the fences more. Check out how his doubles rate almost completely disappears, from 1 every 16-20 at bats during his prime to the 1 every 30-40 at bats from 1972 to the end of his career.
Bonds late career surge came after he moved to a much tougher park to homer in while his doubles rate stayed pretty much the same as it had always been.
Thanks for the clarification, LG. I had never heard Aaron’s record questioned before, apparently for good reason.
To address an earlier comment by Jumbo on the thread, during a recent retrospective on the MLB Network, one segment covered Aaron’s chase against Ruth. It reminded me there was plenty of racial prejudice directed toward Aaron at the time, including letters and death threats. What should have been a even prouder time was blemished by a relatively few idiots, the same types who probably set off people like Whitlock.
I recall when LG offered me his learnedness, at another web site, about Fenway Park. He explained how Fenway is tough on lefty swingers, and offered a link to an Hardball Times article that would substantiate his views. In fact, this article had data showing Edmonds and Bergman had slugged well in Fenway. Cards fans know Edmonds loves to drive the ball to opposite field, and Bergman is good at this too, at least when swinging lefty. The Red Sox have had stars who are lefty swingers. The most famous was Ted Williams, another Carl Yazstremski who liked to aim at the Monster, David Ortiz in recent years, Rich Gedman (though I recall him as a pull hitter), Wade Boggs (who loved to hit to opposite field). So I offer this as a cautionary example of not oversimplifying park effects.
Aaron played in Milwaukee from 1954 to 1965. His age range was about 20 to 31, during these years. After the Braves moved to Atlanta, Aaron played there from 1966 to 1974, age range 32 to 40. His final two seasons were back with Milwaukee, where his wonderful career began. All told, Aaron spent 14 seasons in Milwaukee, 9 more when he was home-based in Atlanta.
Aaron did not have a significant late career home run surge, comparable to Bonds or McGwire. That would be a nice explanation for his late surge. There was not one. Rather, he maintained a high level of home-run performance for a long time, a triumph of durability and steadiness.
As regards Aaron “swinging for the fences” and not collecting so many doubles…….
When 34 years old, Hank stole 28 bases. During the final 8 seasons of his career, he stole a grand total of 25 bases.
He still collected a batting average of .327 when 37 years old and .301 at age 39. He maintained his share of hits.
Another interpretation: slowing down with advancing years, Hank chose to stretch fewer singles into doubles.
I remember clearly the lame race-based arguments about why Aaron’s record shouldn’t count. I had many converaations in an old Montgomery Ward buffeteria with co-workers that felt Aaron’s extra AB’s shoudn’t count, etc.
As for the late power surge conversation, I wasn’t really being serious about questioning Aaron’s age 37 season. I just happened to note the facts. Of course, as in the steroids era, where no player is above suspicion, no player in the “greenies” era should be given a free pass either. Too many of our idols have proven to have clay feet.
Yes Mr.Aaron had a very steady home run rate per season but I agree with Longghandi that Fulton County Stadium (the Launching Pad) helped him to increase his home run totals more than if his whole career had been in Milwaukee.
I also think that many of the best hitters that hit at a high level even towards the end of their careers do so because of their experience–they are able to really perfect their swing and their understanding of hitting a baseball.
I imagine the thing threatening about Aaron to those who champion PED explanations of Bonds, McGwire, and Sosa is Aaron inconveniently kept showing power to age 40, showing some players can maintain power naturally and it does not have to fall off a cliff at age 36. (Did not Bob Gibson maintain good velocity into his late 30s?)
A lot of hitters have benefitted from favorable homeparks and their career stats will have reflected this. The short right field wall at Yankee Stadium must have helped Ruth, Dimaggio, Mantle, Maris, Pepitone, Giambi, etc. So if Aaron was helped by Atlanta’s stadium, its just part of the game.
Clemens, Petitte, Palmeiro, Canseco, Giambi, McGwire, Bonds, Sosa, and loads of other modern athletes are not stupid. They must know full-well that football players and weight-lifters make themselves stronger, so why not baseball players too, absent a testing system to discourage this? Intelligent doses of hormones can empower, just as insulin injections help diabetics or estrogen supplements may be chosen as treatments by women. This enables a great, older player who might have otherwise hit 45 homers in a season (as did Aaron) to instead hit 65. On the other hand, the strengthened modern batter is also facing hormonally helped pitchers too, a countering effect.
Bob Gibson struck out 208 at age 36 and Lou Brock stole 56 bases at age 37. If we assume these gentlmen, like Mr. Aaron, were not have ready access to hormone supplements during their era of play, then they illustrate that some players can perform with great results into their late 30s.
The question is not whether older players perform as well as they had earlier in their careers. The question is when they are substantially more productive than they were during their peak age seasons. Aaron wasn’t; Bonds most certainly was.
As for park effects, I doubt very seriously that I was the one posting on another site about Fenway. It’s certainly possible. But with the exception of this site and the Sporting News Strat-o-matic forums, I rarely if ever post anything in the blogosphere.
But to your point about oversimplifying park effects, it might be prudent to take into acocunt the changes that are made to stadiums before drawing conclusions about how they affect each player’s performance. For example, Yankee Stadium did not help Ruth’s numbers, at least where home runs are concerned. When he played there, the right field power alley was 429′ from home plate and center field was 490′. Comparing his home and road splits for his career, Yankee Stadium probably cost him 20 homers.