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ESPN’s Jeremy Schaap declared in his exposé on Mark McGwire’s tainted career, “We [the public] weren’t perpetrating the fraud…that was McGwire.” With all due respect to Mr. Schaap, he is far too forgiving to baseball audiences everywhere.
Mark McGwire’s admission of steroid use does not come as a surprise, nor should it. Even during the heat of the 1998 home run race with Sammy Sosa, it was not an uncommon school of thought that McGwire was using performance-enhancing drugs. I remember having discussions in fourth and fifth grade with a few of my friends — admittedly, we were all anti-McGwire at the time — about how this couldn’t be legitimate.
The steroid scandal, in which McGwire was one of the first major figures, painted a bright light at a part of the sport that most people would rather not talk about.
Remember the frenzy of attention and affection focused on McGwire and Sammy Sosa, during the 1998. The home run race was on. These men were national heroes, and masses of fans followed them while singing their praises. We, as baseball fans, encouraged their no-holds-barred approach to obtaining the most famous record in the game, willingly turning a blind eye to the problem of steroid use in baseball that was rising in the late 1990s.
We were all too happy to take a “what we don’t know can’t hurt us” approach. This should raise questions about the current mindset of the American sports fan. To examine ourselves as a fan culture, however, we need to remember where we came from.
Baseball fans today seem a far cry from those who surrounded the game just a few decades ago.
Flashback to 1961: When Roger Maris broke fellow Yankee Babe Ruth’s home run record — legitimately, I might add — he was hounded by irate Yankees fans who felt that his accomplishment was illegitimate and should not stand. That was because Maris’ season allowed him 161 games in which to bat, as opposed to Ruth’s 151 games played in 1927.
In fact, Maris’ accomplishment, which was unpopular and considered tainted, was initially given an asterisk in the official record books. The respect for the game’s history was so ingrained in the baseball-going public of 49 years ago that Maris was actually greeted with hostility by the fans of his own team. Clearly, we have pulled a 180-degree turn.
The pageantry of the 1998 race is all too vivid in the memories of baseball fans. The suffocating media coverage, the disputes over home runs caught by fans in the front row all of this is linked in the psyche of the American sports fan to the crazed chase for the single-season home run record.
But McGwire and Sosa didn’t do all of this, the fans did. They didn’t force fans to come to the games, and they didn’t recruit columnists and video journalists to cover them extensively. That was all the fans’ doing. In a culture where sports is the largest form of mass entertainment, we cannot absolve the mass when the performers misstep while trying to appease them.
As fans, we can’t have our cake and eat it too. American sports fans have a definite affinity for the spectacular, but we cannot applaud these athletes and their spectacular steroid-induced performances while simultaneously crying foul on the presence of steroids in the game of baseball.
Essentially, McGwire willingly destroyed over half a century of legitimate baseball history in an effort to appease a rabid fan-base so blind with excitement that they either didn’t see — or didn’t want to see — what he was doing to get there.
McGwire was wrong, that much is certain, but in an American sports culture that loves to build up heroes only to watch them fall, we cannot claim that our hands are clean. As fans, we were all — though some of us more willing than others — accomplices to his crime.
In short, if we really want to get steroids out of baseball, we need to stop with the congressional investigations and the media-fueled witch hunts. We need to collectively look in the mirror and ask ourselves if finding out the truth and cleaning up the sport that has all but lost its title as “America’s Pastime” is worth giving up our clever little self-deceptions.
I’m not recommending we all be cynical fans here. We simply need to become a fan culture that learns to think critically and not wholeheartedly buy into stories which we know are too good to be true. Ultimately, the blame for the damage done to baseball doesn’t lie with McGwire. It’s with us.
Related Posts:- Column: Steroid era closing in sports world (October 19, 2009)
- Column: Big Ben has only himself to blame (April 22, 2010)
- Column: Battling the bandwagon fans (October 5, 2009)
- Putting the steroid era in the rearview mirror (February 12, 2009)
- A circus to flip for (May 13, 2002)
