The Aesthetics of Steroids

At last, a position on steroids that makes sense to me. It comes from a letter-writer on Andrew Sullivan’s blog (unfortunately anonymous, as are all his correspondents). Money quote:

A stronger case against steroids in sports can be made on aesthetic grounds. I follow professional sports not because I want to measure anyone's achievement, but because the spectacle gives me pleasure. If I thought that (or, rather, now that I can't ignore the fact that) their achievement came from steroids, my enjoyment would diminish. Why exactly? Seeing apparently normal people do great things just gives me more pleasure than seeing manufactured behemoths do greater things.

This aesthetic appeal is particularly crucial to major league baseball, which is charming largely because it is played by normal-looking guys, as opposed to pro football and pro basketball, which are played by guys who often look freakish. In fact, the nature of baseball is such that guys who look positively schlumpy are often better at it than sleekly muscular hunks. As Bill James once pointed out, John Kruk, with "a body like a sack of potatoes," was a much better ballplayer than Bo Jackson, who looked like a Greek god. (Yeah, yeah, the Greek gods probably weren’t Black, but you know what I mean.)

This allows us fans to maintain the pleasant illusion that we are (or could be) drinking buddies with our favorite ballplayers, and that, in case of a sudden injury to one of the stars, we might plausibly be called out of the stands to pinch hit late in a game. (As James Thurber remarked many years ago, the majority of middle-aged men fall asleep at night while striking out the lineup of the New York Yankees.)

No way we would entertain the same fantasy about pro football. Even the idea of getting down on the field with those guys is terrifying.

So anyway, it behooves major league baseball to work out a more effective anti-steroids policy. Not because steroids spoil the “purity” or “integrity” of the game but because (a) they’re bad for the players’ health, and (b) they make the game less fun to watch.

In fact, the only problem with the letter on Sullivan's blog is that its argument hinges on the word "aesthetic." Anyone who tried to use that word on a sports radio call-in show would be cut off and probably subjected to death threats as a homosexual liberal fit only to comment on professional figure-skating. That's one of the reasons God invented blogs--to give progressives who like to use words of two syllables or longer a safe place to talk about sports.