On Saturday morning, news broke that Royals infielder Miguel Tejada has been suspended for 105 games. The suspension itself has virtually no impact on the field; Tejada, despite being a former MVP, is 39 years old and his career is over anyway. It does, however, carry a ton of significance when it comes to the off-the-field debate about performance-enhancing drugs. Because Tejada tested positive for amphetamines. Major League Baseball has decided that amphetamines are against the rules, and offenders of those rules deserve suspensions.
These are important ideological distinctions. Because for a period of time within the game (particularly the 1960s and 1970s), amphetamines (or "greenies") were embedded in baseball culture to the same extent as steroids were in the 1990s and early 2000s. The parallels are obvious. Just like anabolic steroids after 1991, amphetamines were illegal in the United States without a prescription after 1965. Yet baseball did virtually nothing to fight the amphetamine problem; they weren't even banned from the game until 1971 and testing for them didn't begin until 2006. Greenies became part of the game, even encouraged in some clubhouses. Jim Bouton famously said that greenies were handed out like candy. Their pervasiveness within the game is easily compared to steroids. Anyone can argue the difference in scale between the two drugs -- amphetamines essentially provide an energy boost, while steroids are perceived as a far more sinister, syringe-induced, body-form-changing elixir of talent-creating cheat-juice. But that's not the issue here. What matters is that they both reside on the same moral plane: forbidden by baseball as a form of cheating.
This is critically important when it comes to the Hall of Fame and the character clause. For several years now, a bloc of holier-than-thou baseball writers have stubbornly refused to even consider (let alone admit) steroid cheats into Cooperstown, from Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire to Roger Clemens and Barry Bonds. The reasoning has been that steroid users broke baseball's rules by taking banned substances, which violated the nebulous character clause of the Hall's voting guidelines. But here's where the mind-boggling intellectual consistency comes into play: by that logic, any player who used amphetamines should be ineligible for induction, too. Morally, there should be no difference between a player who used greenies in 1975 and a player who used steroids in 1995. In both cases, the substance was banned. The specific choice of substance should not matter.
Yet there's a healthy list of Hall of Famers who used amphetamines. In fact, Chipper Jones once said that taking greenies was as routine as putting on one's uniform before a ballgame, so the list is almost certainly longer than we know. Hank Aaron has admitted to trying amphetamines. So has Mike Schmidt. So has Goose Gossage (who is ironically outspoken against cheaters like Clemens ever getting into the Hall). A writer has alleged that Mickey Mantle injected himself with banned substances during his home run chase with Roger Maris. Willie Stargell allegedly provided greenies for his Pittsburgh Pirate teammates. Willie Mays is another alleged user whose locker was supposedly a source of liquid amphetamines ("red juice") for his New York Mets teammates in 1973.
What's the difference between Mays and Stargell using greenies, and Bonds and Clemens using steroids? Steroids were probably more effective and had more obvious side effects. That's really it. In both instances, players went around loosely-defined rules and exploited a comical lack of enforcement to gain a competitive edge. Suggesting that drug cheaters in baseball have only existed since 1990 is ignorant. Players have always sought a chemical advantage, all the way back to Pud Galvin using monkey testosterone in the 19th century. The only difference is that the more recent cheaters have had access to the better drugs.
To become intellectually consistent, the backward-thinking baseball writers have two options. Either evict Hank Aaron and Mike Schmidt and the rest of the admitted "cheaters" from the Hall of Fame for their violations of the character clause. Or stop using the character clause as a selective excuse to keep Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens out. Anything in between would be a hideous double standard, which is exactly what we have right now.
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