But not lost enough to relearn an essential truth: Nothing is ever one thing. Each thing is dozens, thousands, millions of things. Everything discrete is really a cascade of interactions, and it is exceedingly difficult to assign clear casualty to any one of them. (Can you explain where Obama lost the American people? I mean, you can offer an explanation, but can you really explain it?)
Steroid use contributed to baseball players hitting record numbers of home runs in the 1990s and early 2000s. Except they didn’t, at least not in the way we think of, the A to B way that makes it surpassingly easy to condemn those who took steroids, except that we don’t really know who took steroids, how many, how pervasive it was, and whether the use of steroids was any more important than a thousand other factors, like the changing size of baseball parks or the continued dilution of pitching talent (siphoned off by other sports) or the changing sizes of strike zones. There’s just no way of knowing, because…it’s complicated. Posnanski dissects this wonderfully. If you know anything about baseball, this piece is like a really good merlot, one with an incredible finish. If you don’t know anything about baseball, it will still leave you with the question: How will we ever know anything? Outside of the next question, that is.
But, does all this mean that taking steroids wasn’t wrong? Or wasn’t that wrong? I think that depends on what you watch sports for, and what you assume when you watch sports, things I increasingly question for myself. The reason the Tiger Woods scandal hit many of us hard was that we assumed that Tiger’s excellence confirmed all the things we’d been told about him — about his dedication, his work ethic, his fierce focus, etc. — and confirmed them for him, not just his golf. We bought into the idea that superior performance is on some level about morality and moral fiber, not about practice and a narrow kind of genius and possibly beta blockers, too. Or we ignored the idea that morality is actually contextual — that you can actually be moral in sport, and immoral elsewhere.
We all know that many sports players are shits. Still, if you watch sports to have the myth of unified personal morality ratified — and even when I know it is a myth, even when I rehearse that insight to myself, it is still so hard to grasp — then steroids were wrong. If you watch sports to see the limits of “unaided” human performance, then they were wrong, too. But if you watch sports to see amazing things, to just be amazed by a physical act outside of any moral context, maybe not so wrong. Except when the amazing things that someone produces on steroids are amazing in comparison to things that happened when people were just on uppers. Except that Posnanski reminds us that…it wasn’t just the steroids. Or rather, that steroids were just another factor, like moving the outfield fences in 15 feet. Did anyone think that was cheating? Or just increasing the fun?
I have to admit I don’t know what to think now, and that that’s not so bad.
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