Sports Illustrated is running a great baseball story this week.
And though I’m a fan and take my young twin sons to Comiskey Park, and want them to be captivated by the White Sox and by the game, I don’t want my boys to know about this story. Not yet.
The story explains something many of us have suspected for a long time.
The casual fans who fill the ballparks aren’t interested in the fine points of baseball, in pitching duels, in little ball.
Instead, they want to drink beer and watch some sluggo with muscles hit home runs.
The beer comes from cans and kegs. And the home runs come on the tip of a needle.
In the story, Ken Caminiti, the National League’s Most Valuable Player in 1996, says that steroids helped him win the award and that at least half of major league ballplayers are on steroids.
Other ballplayers get strong with injections of human growth hormone. And others pop amphetamines for those pre-game blahs.
“Look at all the money in the game,” Caminiti was quoted as saying, explaining why he doesn’t think steroid use was a mistake and why he can’t tell younger players not to use the performance-enhancing drugs.
“I can’t say, `Don’t do it,’ not when the guy next to you is as big as a house and he’s going to take your job and make the money.”
Caminiti, an alcoholic and drug addict, is out of the game.
But others in the SI story are still playing, and you might be able to spot them from their distended features, their jutting brows and jaws, their super-hero muscles.
In Chicago, look at the Cubs, look at the Sox. Who has the puffy muscles? And did they need a little chemical boost to get that way?
“You sit there and look at some of these players and you know what’s going on,” the great Arizona Diamondbacks pitcher Curt Schilling, a critic of the drugs, said in the article.
“Guys out there look like Mr. Potato Head, with a head and arms and six or seven body parts that just don’t look right,” Schilling said.
The players union remains opposed to testing for steroids, which are illegal for non-medical use in the United States.
It’s clear that steroids are destroying the health of the ballplayers–and maybe the health of the game. It’s also clear that the players union is an ass when it comes to steroids.
Side effects include strokes, heart disease, the inability to produce testosterone, aggressive behavior, liver failure and other problems.
And still players inject, because they want the money that comes from hitting the big home runs, and the owners pretend not to know.
“What do you want from the players?” said a friend of mine, a guy named Nick, a realist, a West Sider and a Cubs fan. “Others are doing it. They’re doing it. This is professional sport. They’re pieces of meat.
“If they’re not doing steroids, they lose their jobs. If they can’t hit a baseball, what can they do? They can go back to the Dominican Republic and shine shoes, or start chopping sugar cane. That’s what they can do. That’s their choice.”
Sportscasters didn’t seem too impressed when the story broke the other day. They suggest nobody should be surprised, that all fans know.
But all fans don’t know about steroids and human growth hormone in baseball.
They’re kids.
I know a boy who thinks he’s Magglio Ordonez, the Sox right fielder. He holds his bat high, like Mags, and makes tight circles in the air with the club. When he does this, you’ve got to call him “Mags.”
The other boy, a lefty, thinks he’s the ace pitcher Mark Buehrle, when he’s not pretending to be Kenny Lofton, the center fielder and leadoff man.
But it’s not only pretending, exactly, when kids mimic the major leaguers. Pretending is make believe, and this baseball imitation of kids is more than pretend. Instead, it is about transformation.
Their bodies shift. Their faces change. Expressions become competitive, down to Ordonez’s stare or Buehrle’s smirk, too intense for their former selves but perfectly matching their new temporary selves, their major league baseball selves, as the men they expect to be and defy themselves to become.
And it’s not peculiar to Sox fans, either.
How many middle-age men out there grab a bat for the first time in years and wish for some dirt to wash their hands in, the way Ron Santo did years ago at Wrigley?
It is one way that the game reaches a kid, first with the initial sighting of the grass in a major league ballpark, and then through the ritual of mimicry.
It is how fans are made and transformed, for a lifetime.
But now I’ve got a question for Major League Baseball, for the players, for the owners:
These days, when a child mimics a big league ballplayer, just when is he supposed to drop the bat and pick up the syringe?
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jskass@tribune.com
