Mitts, Bats, and Syringes

Just as the month of February nears its middle, we sports fans are starting to get buzzed about baseball. America's pastime has awoken from its hibernation, ready to entertain us for the long summer ahead. In any other season sports junkies like me would be focused entirely on pitchers and catchers reporting to spring training, ready to predict which young players would emerge from the minors, or which pitchers would win twenty games this season. This year, though, America's biggest baseball story takes place far from idyllic grass fields. "Swing, batter batter" has been replaced by "I solemnly swear". The main spectacle wears a suit to his game, and the umps work on Capitol Hill.

Steroids has taken the spotlight of baseball away from, well, baseball. America's pastime, its most historic game, has been infiltrated with shady deals and drug suppliers. The man on the hill in today's game, a federal hearing on steroid use, is Roger Clemens. Once a shoo in Hall of Famer, the Rocket's name is forever tarnished. It seems like the fight against steroids has found its target.

Roger Clemens is one of the most successful pitchers in the history of the game. Once feared and respected on the mound, he was the biggest name in the Mitchell Report, a congressional report highlighting steroid use in baseball released in January. Clemens has vehemently denied ever taking steroids, while his former personal trainer Brian McNamee has sworn under oath that he injected steroids into Roger Clemens multiple times.

With both men coming from totally different directions, and with both claiming to have the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, somebody must be telling a bald faced lie. This makes the case even more interesting for Americans. Who is the liar here? Is it the former trainer who claims to have once negotiated with dealers to deliver drugs to Clemens, or is it the highly visible pitcher who has won 300 games and made 3,000 strikeouts, and claims to be cleaner than Martha Stewart’s kitchen? Could McNamee just be trying to get himself a name by bringing down Clemens? We may never know the entire truth, and that’s what makes this trial so captivating.

This trial could be one of the defining sports moments in our history, a scandal so large that baseball hasn’t seen anything like it since the Black Sox in 1919. The ramifications of a massive steroid scandal, where Clemens is only the tip of the iceberg, could permanently cripple the sport. I believe a majority of America’s baseball players are clean, but if one of its most visible figures and greatest players can take steroids, than who can’t? When we crown greatness in baseball, how can we know that it wasn’t artificial? How can we know that those home runs or that 98 mph fastball didn’t come from a BALCO factory? We can’t, and until we are able to fully put the steroid age behind us, when we won’t assume success means cheating, baseball will suffer.

Judge for yourself.