Tiger shortstop Jhonny Peralta will spend the next 50 of the Tigers' final 53 regular season games on the shelf for using Performance Enhancing Drugs. Tiger fans are supposed to be really, really mad at Peralta. He let us down, he let his team down, and (according to blowhard JV coaches everywhere) he let himself down.
Even convicted pension grifter Denny McLain is thoroughly outraged that Peralta didn't appeal the suspension--an action unlikely to be successful, but could greatly impact Peralta's future earnings as a ballplayer as well as his ability to play this postseason--because it is quitting on his team.
Detroit Free Press: “Everything’s about him. It’s not about the team. It’s not about the playoffs. It’s not about the World Series. It’s pure selfishness.
“All he wanted to do was put himself in position to get a multiyear contract for an awful lot of money. It clearly shows it’s all about him and nobody else. He might be a great kid and everything, but somehow or other, he took the wrong turn. Listen, everybody can take the wrong turn from time to time.”
And here, at last, we see the moral panic over PEDs in baseball reach its logical and absurd conclusion. Denny McLain (a man who quit on his own team during the '67 pennant race with a stubbed toe (no mafiso involved, right Den?), who was suspended from baseball for associating with gamblers and gangsters as well as for assaulting a reporter, who saw his career implode before he turned 30, and who spent more than one stretch as a guest of the state for numerous crimes including stealing pension money from meat packers) is given space in a major daily newspaper to wag his finger at a ballplayer for accepting a suspension that will allow him to be available for the post-season roster.
What's Freep sportswriter George Sipple's next act? Interview OJ Simpson about the upcoming NFL season?
Now, true, Peralta broke the rules of baseball by using PEDs. He admits as much. There's no positive drug test, and that's but one troubling aspect of Bud Selig's white whale hunt, but Peralta has copped to the crime, so it's hard to argue with against the suspension at this point.
The moral condemnation of Peralta and the other ballplayers involved in the Biogenisis case, however, is another matter. For all the outrage about these "cheaters" destroying the sanctity of baseball, the opposite seems to be true. After the post-strike malaise, the game rode the so-called steroid era wave to new heights of popularity.
Do fans honestly believe the 1998 home run chase was less special or historic because Mark McGwire was bulking up with something more potent than andro? Do we really believe Roger Clemens and Barry Bonds weren't the once-a-generation superstars that they clearly were because they hopped aboard the PED train late in their careers? If the Tigers win the World Series, will we consider that championship "tainted" because Peralta's production helped them win the division?
No. No one believes those things.
Do Performance Enhancing Drugs Actually Enhance Performance?
When one considers the roster of players busted in this latest PED scandal, one must ask if these drugs really alter performance as we've been led to believe. Alex Rodriguez had a monster career, sure, but the most of these guys are hardly Hall of Famers. The Tigers released minor league journeyman Cesar Carrillo after he served his PED suspension. Looking at his numbers, it's hard to imagine Cesar Carrillo would have been any less impressive without "performance enhancement."
Is it possible that PEDs aren't the superman pills we've been led to believe and more akin to some kind of Dr. Sheamus T. MacGuillicutty's Miracle Elixer patent medicine?
Bloomberg columnist Jonathan Mahler makes a compelling case for that augment.
According to this interview with ex-master doper Victor Conte, it was growth hormone and various forms of testosterone administered through troches, which he compared to Life Savers. Conte also said the drugs would likely have been flushed out of the players’ systems within hours. Pop one in your mouth before going to bed and your urine would be clear by morning.
Which leads one to wonder: How useful could these drugs have been? Was Anthony Bosch’s clinic basically just peddling placebos?
For that matter, how effective are any PEDs, at least when it comes to baseball? We are all familiar with the narrative of the “Steroid Era” and the game’s attendant power surge. But this is more myth than reality. Joe Sheehan, a former writer and editor for Baseball Prospectus, calls it “the Big Lie,” which he convincingly debunks with simple statistics in a recent newsletter. It’s subscription-only, but the gist of his argument is that home runs and slugging percentages declined in the post-testing era not because PEDs had been chased out of the game, but because of increased strikeout rates.
We also haven't seen many, if any, ex-ballplayers suffer long-term health consequences from PED use. In contrast to the concussion-fueled brain damage epidemic among NFL retirees, the health risks of PEDs seem akin to drinking too much soda pop. Actually, a Mountain Dew habit might be worse for all we know.
Really, we're condemning Peralta and company for doing something that might have a marginal (at best) affect on their performance and may or may not cause long-term negative side effects?
Surgeon si, pharmacist no!
Again, rules are rules, but it's worth asking if this rule needs to exist in the first place. Ballplayers have been using "greenies" and other speed pills for years to get them up for games without complaint from fan nor commissioner. It's not as though modern players' pharmaceutical activities have besmirched a once-pure game that lived up to Mary Baker Eddy's vision of temperance.
And why exactly are performance enhancing drugs such a threat to the game but there's no problem with healthy pitchers opting for preemptive Tommy John surgery in the hopes of throwing harder?
"It is now quite lawful for a Catholic woman to avoid pregnancy by a resort to mathematics, though she is still forbidden to resort to physics or chemistry," H.L. Mencken once said of birth control taboos. So it is with baseball where, apparently, it remains quite lawful to improve performance on the surgeon's table while improvements found in the pharmacy remain forbidden.
Rather than condemning Peralta, let's acknowledge what he's brought to our team. He's played serviceable shortstop, mostly carried his weight in the line-up, made two all-star teams, and has helped the Tigers toward what should be their third straight postseason appearance.
Like any player caught corking his bat, scuffing a baseball, or throwing at a batter, Peralta will serve his suspension and hopefully he'll return in October to help the Tigers win their first world championship in almost 30 years.
Even if the Tigers fall short of that goal, Peralta has helped make these last few years of Tiger baseball some of the best in their history. For that, the only thing Tiger fans need to say to Peralta is thank you for a job well done.
