Sunday, January 22, 2017

Cooperstown Must Decide if it’s a Museum or a Shrine

© George Will, Washington Post Jan 22, 2017
WASHINGTON -- 

Many Americans are more thoughtful when choosing appliances than when choosing presidents, but the baseball writers whose ballots decide who is “enshrined” -- more about that verb anon -- in Cooperstown’s Hall of Fame are mostly conscientious voters struggling to unravel a knotty puzzle: How to treat retired players who are known or suspected to have used performance enhancing drugs (PEDs) while compiling gaudy numbers?

Such chemicals increase muscle mass, thereby increasing hitters’ bat speeds, pitchers’ velocities, and recovery from the strain of training and competing. On Wednesday, two highly probable users, Roger Clemens (third-most career strikeouts, seven Cy Young awards) and Barry Bonds (career and season home run records, seven MVP awards) reached 54.1 percent and 53.8 percent, respectively, up from 45.2 percent and 44.3 percent last year and approaching the 75 percent threshold for admission. Only three players have reached 50 percent without eventually being admitted (Jack Morris, Gil Hodges, Lee Smith).

Cooperstown’s administrators -- it is not run by Major League Baseball -- and the writers-cum-gatekeepers must decide what the institution is. Its title -- the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum -- implies that the hall containing the players’ plaques is somehow apart from and other than the museum. The Oxford English Dictionary defines “museum” as where “objects of historical, scientific, artistic or cultural interest are stored and exhibited.” A “shrine” contains “memorabilia of a particular revered person or thing.” Cooperstown stipulates that “voting shall be based upon the player’s record, playing ability, integrity, sportsmanship, character and contributions to the team(s) on which the player played.”

Some players’ records reflect abilities enhanced by acts of bad character -- surreptitious resorts to disreputable chemistry that traduces sportsmanship. But as younger writers who did not cover baseball during the PED era become Hall of Fame voters, the electorate is becoming less interested in disqualifying PED users. These writers should, however, consider why PEDs matter.

They subvert the central idea of sport -- athletes competing on equal terms. Distinguishing legitimate from illegitimate athletic enhancement can be complex: The body produces testosterone and human growth hormone (HGH) that are components of some potent PEDs. Enhancements improve performance without devaluing it only if they involve methods and materials (e.g., better training and nutrition) that help the body perform unusually rather than unnaturally well.

PEDs mock the idea that winning is a just reward for praiseworthy behavior -- submission to an exacting training regimen and the mental mastery of pressure, pain and exhaustion. Drugs that make sport exotic make it less exemplary; they drain sport of admirable excellence, which elevates spectators as well as competitors.

Beyond this civic interest in honest athletics, there is a matter of justice. Many former ballplayers missed having major league careers, or longer major league careers with larger contracts, because they competed honestly against cheating opponents, or lost playing time to cheating teammates. These handicapped-because-honorable players could have leveled the playing field only by using dangerous PEDs, thereby jeopardizing their physical and mental health and forfeiting their integrity.

And consider Fred McGriff, who in 19 sterling seasons during the steroid era hit 493 home runs, seven short of the 500 mark that has generally opened Cooperstown’s doors to eligible players (retired five years) not suspected of PED use. There is no suspicion that McGriff used PEDs, and if he had he certainly would have hit many more than seven additional home runs. The closest he has come to Cooperstown’s 75 percent is 23.9 percent in 2012. (He received 21.7 percent Wednesday.) And there are players in Cooperstown whose careers were enhanced by amphetamines, which once were ubiquitous in baseball but now are banned.

Until baseball’s steroid parenthesis, only one demarcation had disrupted the game’s continuity, that between the dead ball era and, beginning around 1920, the live ball era. The parenthesis has been closed, although the financial incentives to cheat are such that there always will be sinister chemists competing to concoct PEDs that defeat the efforts of other chemists to detect them. The incentives can, however, be decisively reordered by sufficiently severe penalties, which almost all players would favor.

If Cooperstown is content, as perhaps it should be, to be merely a museum -- not a negligible thing -- then Bonds and Clemens belong there as important elements of the game’s story, and their story should be candidly told on their plaques. If, however, Cooperstown wants admission to mean enshrinement, it must embrace and articulate the Hall’s ethic. America has never more urgently needed the insistence that real success must be honorably achieved.

Thursday, January 5, 2017

Starting the New Year with some humor

Author Unknown

1. My goal for 2016 was to lose just 10 pounds. Only 15 to go.

2. Ate salad for dinner. Mostly croutons & tomatoes. Really just one big round crouton covered with tomato sauce. And cheese. FINE, it was a pizza. I ate a pizza.

3. How to prepare Tofu:
a. Throw it in the trash
b. Grill some meat

4. I just did a week's worth of cardio after walking into a spider web.

5. I don't mean to brag, but I finished my 14-day diet food in 3 hours and 20 minutes.

6. A recent study has found women who carry a little extra weight live longer than men who mention it.

7. Kids today don't know how easy they have it. When I was young, I had to walk 9 feet through shag carpet to change the TV channel.

8. Senility has been a smooth transition for me.

9. Remember back when we were kids and every time it was below zero out they closed school? Me neither.

10. I may not be that funny or athletic or good looking or smart or talented. I forgot where I was going with this.

11. I love being over 65. I learn something new every day and forget 5 others.

12. A thief broke into my house last night. He started searching for money so I woke up and searched with him.

13. I think I'll just put an "Out of Order" sticker on my forehead and call it a day.

14. November 6, 2016 was the end of Daylight Savings Time. Hope you didn't forget to set your bathroom scale back 10 pounds on Saturday night.

15. Just remember, once you're over the hill you begin to pick up speed.