Balls 5

Author: Justin Golenbock

The controversy around substance abuse has clotted our enjoyment of sports played around the world. From Lance Armstrong to Barry Bonds to Nancy Kerrigan to Ivan Drago, accusations of steroid abuse range across sports, with prominent athletes testing positive in baseball, football, boxing, cycling, the Olympics and even professional surfing (who will forget the infamous Percy "Neco" Padaratz?). Human Growth Hormone, herbal Ephedra and EPO are a few of the many dangerous "performance-enhancing" drugs available.

In 1970, Jim Bouton penned the fantastically funny and highly controversial "Ball 4," (the entirely obscure reference that lends this column its name), a work that exposed the widespread abuse of "greenies" (cheap amphetamines the equivalent of jacked-up Ritalin) that Bouton claimed were giving baseball players an unfair advantage. His revelations were similar to what we're finding out about steroids in baseball, despite the existence of a number of at least equally provocative theories for the 90s power spike: smaller strike zones, lowered pitching mounds, juiced-up baseballs and advances in weight training (Niall Sullivan again?).

There is no question that many of these drugs have disastrous effects on the human body. But to what extent? What causal evidence is there that links steroid use specifically to performance in fine-skilled sports like baseball (and surfing)?

In asking these questions, let me first draw a connection with another substance most of us are familiar with abusing. On May 17, 1998, three days before his 35th birthday, David Wells pitched the 13th perfect game of the century. The game began at 1 p.m., eight hours after the Boomer's gelatinous bulk was carried out of the season-ending "Saturday Night Live" cast party. He wrote in his autobiography that he was still "half-drunk" when he threw the first pitch of that game (though an angered Steinbrenner would back Wells off that comment, with the pitcher dialing it down to a "head-splitting hangover").

Yet aging NBA star Vin Baker did not fair as well before Jim O'Brien kicked him off the Celtics. Did his alcoholism make him fat and terrible, or was he already fat and terrible, so he turned to alcohol (and screwed our cap for years to come)? Clearly alcohol, marijuana (Ricky Williams) or cocaine (Reggie Lewis) are not performance-enhancing but performance-inhibiting, yet by selectively picking examples their effects on performance can be made to look insignificant. One convicted user, Jason Giambi, is a leading Comeback Player of the Year candidate in New York, while another, Manny Alexander, is 0 for the season in San Diego. These drugs are dangerous and need to be eliminated for the athletes' protection. Yet when judging competitive balance alone, how can we look only at athletic performance and know what's really going on?