I grew up a sports-lover and followed every sports according to season. I bought baseball cards, memorized stats (which I can still tell you some), and idolized my favorite players. Even one of my birthday cakes was Mark McGwire themed - topped with one of his baseball cards and decorated with green and yellow icing.
Over the years, my love of 'sports' hasn't changed, but my idolization of athletes have. As I started viewing sports through an adult's eyes, I couldn't ignore the fact that the athletes were human and had the same flaws regular people have. The have domestic disputes, drinking/drug problems, and traffic violations; things you can read about everyday in your city's paper. Again, as a fan, I understood everyone has problems but these issues didn't affect their play on the field and the sport directly. That is until the steriod contreversy over the last two decades. Nothing has made me lose more respect for athletes and forced me away from the professional athletics.
I've never been blind to the issue. Even as a kid in the 80s, I saw the changes in the athletes. In the early 90s as Sammy Sosa went from a skinny, base-stealing threat to a hulking, homerun killer, my friends and I joked that we needed to join his off-season workout program. Even though we really didn't know what steroids were and how they worked, my friends and I all assumed his muscle gain wasn't 'natural' because we KNEW he couldn't bulk up that much in one offseason. How the adults and other athletes could ignore this is beyond me.
During my college years as McGwire and Sosa blasted homeruns farther than anyone player before, I found it easy to ignore the problem as well. It was fun every morning reading the box scores and seeing that they hit ANOTHER homerun inching ever closer to historic records. In the back of my mind, I knew that it wasn't natural (along with what I've already mentioned about Sammy, how could McGwire go from an injury-prone 6'5" skinny player to a Paul Bunyan, 70-homer monster?). Yet, all baseball fans chose to look past this because maybe we still idolized the players and their superhuman feats. We wanted them to be able to do things noone is the long history of baseball came close to. Second basemen, traditionally the weak-hitting link of team, were putting up 30+ homerun years. In previous decades, 40 homeruns would probably win the player the HR title, but in the 90s, that number was reached by the allstar break. I call these years the 'Nintendo' years because of the out-of-the-world stats ALL players were putting up. Besides, fans were still healing from the effects of the '94 strike and these feats helped us heal.
So as the information has mounted over the past few seasons of how much steroids were part of the 90s baseball culture, what will heal us from this? I 'knew' Sosa was a user, I understood that McGwire, my childhood idol, did as well. I saw Brady Anderson and how he went from a high of 18 homeruns to 51 the next season, and finally, NOONE could ignore Barry Bonds and his age-defying seasons. As each year passed and more ridiculous stats were put up, the more I became bitter about how these players were ruining the SPORT.
One of the best things about baseball is that the game hasn't changed. It's the one sport you can compare statistics from the 20s to the present day and argue which team or player is better. Sure, the athletes of today are in better shape than years ago, but at the same time, the competition is tougher. Could Babe Ruth be as good today as he was in his generation? How would Alex Rodriguez do against a young Sandy Kofax? Steroids changed this though. You can no longer compare the 90s generation to previous ones because their feats aren't 'natural'. These players were making a joke of the game, and if something wasn't done, irrepreble damage.
Now that a new book is coming out entitled 'Game of Shadows' detailing Barry Bonds' steroid use, maybe this is another step towards healing the game. If you love baseball, you can't enjoy the 90s and what they did to the sport. It's too bad, but as long as baseball is played and those stats are kept, that generation will have to be known as the 'steroid' generation. If it's confirmed that Bonds was a user, do you want to delete his stats? What about Palmero and his documented failed steroid test? What about the other suspicious stats? It's sad because you CAN'T delete one without deleating ALL of them....and that won't happen. Because of everyone (fans, other players, owners and higher-ups) ignoring the problems for so long, the generation is tarnished. All we can do is hope everything comes to light and any player who has used to be confronted.
