Sunday, May 17, 2009

Steroids / Baseball Integrity

With Manny Ramirez recently getting a 50 game suspension for using a banned substance, the talk has been stirred up again about how substance abuse and steroids ruins the integrity of the game. The obvious answer is yes, of course it does. However, this is baseball we are talking about. There is no other major league sport that I can think of that has less integrity that baseball over the course of it's history. This is a sport where not just one player has been banned for life for betting on the game and point shaving, but an entire team was convicted of it (the 1919 "Black" sox). We are currently in the steroid era, but we've certainly had other dubious era's in baseball. Corked bats, spit balls. Teams have staff who are specifically assigned to spy on the opposing manager and try to steal their signs and crack them.
Cheating has always been a part of baseball and it always will be. With all this cheating ingrained into the history of the game, I just can't see how steroids violates the integrity of the game. It merely confirms that it is still a game without integrity. So next time another player gets a case of the mascot head and gets sat down for steroids and has their "legacy" ruined, don't think of it as destroying the integrity of the game, think of it as them continuing the cheating subculture that has plagued this game throughout its history.