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I do not often agree with Charlie Pierce, but he is right on the money here:
However, this is the most interesting part of the piece.
“When I came to the big leagues in 1970 with the Big Red Machine, the trainer told me, ‘You need to take these vitamins,’ ’’ Carbo said.
OK, can we all stop talking about steroids now?
Seriously, illegal amphetamines were being handed out by untrained team staff, without the faintest notion of informed consent, to rookies on behalf of the clubs themselves. Major-league baseball was pushing speed, and lying to the people to whom it was pushing it. This is precisely the way the dealers in the early years got the crack epidemic up and running. No wonder Carbo got hooked.
(And don’t even start with the argument about what “performance-enhancing” really means. Giving you speed while telling you that it was vitamin pills, and doing so clearly in the hope of making you play better, means that the trainer — and through him, the club — is trying to enhance your performance. Period. Unless words mean nothing at all, the debate is all useless semantics, except that I suspect more of the guys who juiced in the 1990′s benefitted from better medical advice than did the guys in the 1970′s who were gobbling speed like it was Jujubes.)
What do we do now? Take these guys out of the Hall of Fame? Obliterate them from the record books? Show up at Old Timer’s Days and boo them? (“AND WHAT ABOUT THE CHILDREN???????????”) Treat, say, Mike Schmidt like Barry Bonds? These guys all took illegal drugs and did so to play better. Unless you define your morality by what sounds best during your spot on Around The Horn, there is no moral difference in the two cases worthy of discussion.
Hank Aaron admitted to trying greenies once, and I think it is fair to say that a large chunk of players were using them in the middle to late stages of the 20th century. As I have noted before, cheating and inequity have long been a part of the game, as well as sports in general. It is always necessary to judge players by the context within which they acted. Babe Ruth played in the age of segregation and did not have to face some of the better athletes of his day. Hank Aaron played in an era where taking greenies were the norm. We cannot look at their accomplishments with reverence while dismissing certain issues as products of their era without doing the same with the players of the steroid era. Ignoring things like greenies because they interfere with our romanticized version of the past while making villains of current players for making a similar moral choice is simply unfair.
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9 Responses to Pierce: Amphetamines Mean Old-Timers Were No Better
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TIQ IQ
Not even close.
Totally different stuff.
Amphetemines allowed you to be you, when you were up all night, smoking, drinking and carousing, Steroids allowed you to be somebody else somebody better than just you.
Different ball game and look at the different results.
There were years during that period where they had ot change the rules to get some hitting in the game.
With steroids, second baseman & SS’s started hitting opposite field HR’s, something only monsters did during the period when they took Amphetemines.
Dodgers won the pennant in 1966 with only one guy hittiing as many as 20 HR”s, Jim Lefebrve.Ine year there were almost no .300 hitters in the league, maybe 1967.
Nowhere near being the same, or even close.
So let me get this straight-it’s better to spend no time at all trying to improve your ability to do what you’re getting paid to do, instead spending your free time boozing and chasing skirts and using amphetemines to even be able to play at all than it is to spend your time working out and trying to do everything you can to improve your ability to do what you’re getting paid to do-including using steroids?
In both cases the drugs are illegal. In both cases they’re used to ‘enhance’ a player’s performance. How effective they were has zero moral relevance. (The bigger strike zone and the size of the ’66 Dodger’s home park leading to greatly decreased HRs hit by that team is completely irrelevant. Pitchers used greenies, too.)
I think the first guy is stealing the fan’s money. I’d much rather have a guy trying to improve than a guy using speed to skate by without lifting a finger to better himself.
Who said anything about Better?
Taking an amphetimine is like drinking 3 cups of coffee before the game in effect, assuming caffeine
gets your heart pumping like it does mine.Just without the peeing.It’s a short term burst.
Steroids change your entire metabolic system and allows you to become a different person, long term and to an extent forever.
You can workout more often and add weight, good weight, muscle.
It’s apples and oranges.
Thanks, you saved me from having to go on a writing rampage. I’ve never seen anybody on any form of “speed” do anything better except maybe move around more….Steroids, well we have the proof right in front of us by looking at the top 10 HR leaders, year by year, since 1995. ‘nough said…
Bull’s-eye.
Where’s all the media outcry? Where’s the ‘purists’ demanding that these people be ‘McGuired’ in frint of a senate subcommittee chaired by some self-righteous tit?
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I think it’s a weak argument. Do I agree that the “purism” charges are nonsense? Sure. Do I think this witch-hunt has more to do with the grandstanding of people with soapboxes than with real concern for youth or the legacy of the game? Absolutely. But at the end of the day trying to say that aspects of the game that made it different across eras, eg bigger parks equaling higher batting average but fewer homeruns, trains somehow being easier means of travel than planes, the exclusion of black players limiting the talent pool, does not somehow make these records less artificial. Amphetamines are performance-enhancing, steroids are performance enhancing, therefore amphetamines equal steroids. As another contributor pointed out not all performance enhancements improve performance as much or in the same ways as others. This supports the contention that today’s athletes are not uniquely dishonest or the worst “cheaters” in the history of the game but it does not mean that Bonds hitting 70 is more impressive than Maris hitting 61.
can not compare the them.. how about the mantles, ford et.al of the baseball world, drunk most of the time…what kind of #s do you put in if they didn’t abuse their bodies..imagine ruth working out with todays technology .. 1000 homers. remember he made records ,not chase them.. speed only made them stay up longer to drink more..