More Juiced-up Ramblings

Well, I brought a pen and a notebook up to Stella’s with hopes of using them to take reading notes on Aristotle, but I need to take some time to think on paper, think on paper about steroids and baseball. The big, hulking bitch of this moment is Mark McGwire’s humiliating slide into disgrace after his horrible performance at last week’s Congressional hearings on steroid use in major league baseball. His fall is my fall, his humiliation is my humiliation, the humiliation of millions of baseball fans like me, people who were introduced to the love of the game, or who re-kindled it from embers that were very close to dying in the nether regions of their hearts, when they watched the home run race of 1998, an event that now will necessarily, depressingly, be described as incredible in all senses of the word, only one of which gives us any cause for joy, let alone love.

Baseball is about love, about love deeply held, of beauty, of knowledge, of human virtue perfectly presented in improvised little three-hour dramas staged every day in every American city. It is our civic soul. Plato, an expert on the subject of civic souls, tells us that there is no virtue in cheating, no beauty in ignorance, and no humanity in injustice. Steroid use has stripped baseball’s soul of all beauty, and I find it impossible at present that anyone could truly love baseball, at least major league baseball, and avoid flirting with self-deception. I am heartbroken.

The soul of any thing is that which persists in it beneath any changes it may undergo. Persistence must occur over time, and time yields history: records, in the case of baseball, and moments remembered. The scandalous revelations about the steroid era reveal both its records and its moments as distortions. For the philosopher-baseballist, the scandal is how history was willingly contemned by steroid users and their enablers in baseball’s front offices. Many people have defended the juice by saying that cheating has always been a part of baseball, and they’re right, to a point: all ballplayers try to get away with breaking the rules, if that will help win games, and such attempts are an accepted, roguishly charming part of the game. Very well and good, but the rules broken in the cases those people cite were written rules. Virtue, truth, and beauty are not contained in law.

For baseball, those three things are contained in the humanity of the game, but where is the humanity in a game dominated by men who secretly break the physical limits that were imposed by nature? Would it be any better if they did so openly? The humanity of the records and moments created in our memory during the steroid era is a malicious boondoggle. It was a freak show devoid of soul, of humanity, staged with all the crass greed of the worst charlatanism that can possibly be wreaked on mortal men. If this is not so, then baseball has never been any better, less inhuman, of more incoherent essence; then nothing has persisted, the American game has no soul.

Baseball, and baseball fans, must find the courage to face this hard truth, to allocute, to give account of their respective complicity in this little atrocity. We must restore the history of the game. Give baseball’s soul back the truth and beauty of its voice, and baseball will heal. Do anything less, and the truth, the beauty – the love of the game – will all disappear forever – becoming nothing more than artifacts of hazy memories drawn from a time when love was more than the fancy of an idiot.