Throwing Pluckytown a Changeup

I realized something today: we, as a site, have been very football-heavy lately. I want to apologize for this. I realize that a large portion of our readership (three out of the five of you) aren't exactly what would be classified as sports fans, and we've been going willy-nilly all over the football season. We've talked about predictions for the NFL season and even fantasy football while completely neglecting other things that might be interesting our readership. Therefore, I've decided to throw Pluckytown a change up and try to hit one out of the park with this outing and hope I don't make an error and completely balk. That's right, folks: I'm talking about baseball!

Baseball has constantly been billed as "America's pastime." Somehow the fact that it's a really, really old game gets the pundits to want to make us believe that it should be given some extra-special place in our hearts. Don't get me wrong; I enjoy baseball every so often. However, I have a hard time with the current state of baseball. Currently, the Phillies have a player, Ryan Howard, who has the potential to hit 60+ homers, and there are some people (or at least, there are people who say that there are people) who are saying that he'd be the "true" home run hitter since he's the first one who would have done it clean while those who have hit more than Roger Maris (Bonds, McGwire, and Sosa) have a gigantic cloud of suspicion hanging around them when it comes to their potential body chemistry and the modification thereof. The obvious problem with that thinking is that we can't guarantee that Howard is clean. After all, human growth hormone is still not being tested for since we don't have a reliable test for it. Therefore, we can't assume that Howard isn't using HGH all of a sudden. This bothers me. Not that we don't know if he's using something, but that we need to ask these questions at all. Whenever someone is starting to show some very good power numbers, the whispers begin. Is he using? What is he using? Do any of his former teammates say anything about him possibly using? Does he look any bigger than last year? We can't be sure that some of the most-hallowed numbers in the sport are valid. This will especially be the case if Bonds breaks Henry Aaron's career home run record. How can I respect a sport if I can't respect some of their records?

One of the arguments that people make when talking about the steroids/performance enhancers in baseball is that many of these drugs weren't outlawed by Major League Baseball until this year. Here's the problem with that argument: They were outlawed by the US government prior to this year. I think that US law should supersede MLB, don't you? Another argument is that they don't help you hit the ball anyway, so where is the problem? It's very true that there is no empirical evidence that steroids help a person's hand-eye coordination. They help strength. We do know, however, that at the AAA and Major League level of play, the athletes already know how to hit the ball; it's just a matter of hitting it where people can't catch it. Therefore, added strength would give enough velocity to grounders to get more of them through the defense. They would give routine fly balls that extra ten, fifteen feet that they need to get over the wall. Strength is part of hitting home runs.

There was an old episode of Saturday Night Live where they did a skit entitled the "All Drug Olympics." The premise was that there were no drugs outlawed and when a competitor was about to perform, they announced what drugs he or she was on. I'm thinking that baseball should adopt a similar policy. "Coming up to the plate, we have Foo Bar and he's hitting .385 this season while on uppers at game-time, downers at bed-time and steroids all the time. He also takes a shot of bourbon before games on Sunday." That way, at least, we'll know how chemically advanced our favorite players are.