words.
"The Hall electors have every reason to be angry with the players. But what about the writers themselves? Was there anyone closer to the action, to the players, than the game’s reporters? The use of performance-enhancing drugs, especially in the nineties, was hardly a subtle matter. When a player’s facial features morph, when his head grows two hat sizes larger, when a wiry first baseman begins to resemble a bodybuilder, one tends to notice these changes. Some beat reporters saw Mark McGwire in the clubhouse every day, season after season. As reporters, wasn’t it their job to investigate, to ask questions, to develop good sources? Instead of remaining skeptical, many scribes were, like all of us, dazzled by the home runs and the drama of witnessing new records, and caught up in following the sagas of duelling sluggers. In spinning the grand story, writers were given a taste of glory, and enjoyed some of the best sports copy since the days of Ruth and Aaron.
In 1961, writers had the privilege of reporting on Roger Maris’s doing the near impossible and breaking the Babe’s single-season record of sixty home runs. At the turn of the twentieth century, they got to see Ruth’s record surpassed six times, including McGwire’s truly impossible seventy, in 1998, and Bonds’s seventy-three, in 2001. It’s almost touching now to read the breathless, sort-of embarrassing “Special Commemorative Issue” that Sports Illustrated published in 1998 to honor the “Great Home Run Race” between the juicers McGwire and Sammy Sosa. The steroid era was a moment of deception but also of starry-eyed self-deception; if it was a breakdown of integrity on the part of baseball’s stars it was also, in some measure, a failure of sports journalism.
Because the steroid story usually takes the form of a blame game, there doesn’t seem to be much room for reflection on the role that they, the baseball writers—or, for that matter, any dedicated observer of the game—may have played as enablers of cheating. I wonder about this myself. I remember watching Mark McGwire transform into a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade float version of himself and hit nine-thousand-foot home runs every other game and thinking that something was amiss. In that very same moment, I also somehow shelved my doubts so that I could enjoy the spectacle or, when I was feeling fancy, “witness history.” The sportswriting of that period, too, reveals a curious human talent for simultaneously knowing and not knowing..."
THE NEW YORKER: Baseball Scribes in the Time of Steroids
EARLIER:
Numbers on the Boards.
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