Lately I have been watching some baseball players struggle and I thought it might be an opportunity for a lesson in which I could teach my son why performance enhancing drugs are bad.
But here’s the problem: the lessons MLB lets us take away don’t match the lesson I don’t want to teach my son.
It seems to me that if you take PEDs you can increase your chances of hitting 50 home runs, 70 home runs, maybe win an MVP or two, maybe some team will reward you with hundreds of millions of dollars. Sometimes NYC will even throw you a ticker-tape parade after FOX markets your feel-good story.
Sure, when things go bad and you get caught, you can go the route of admitting it and throw yourself on the “I just wanted to get back to help the team” sword, and the fans will roll over and say you are a good guy and cheer you.
One day when your performance declines suddenly it seems that nobody likes you. But hey you already have fame and fortune and money in the bank.
Maybe it makes sense to take more PEDs to get your numbers back up so you can be loved and make even more money.
This is on baseball and this is on the union. Baseball is not a good role model.
I’d say one and done. No 50 game suspensions. One and done. You cheat, you’re out forever. That’s what we should teach our children.
Once on the satellite radio MLB channel someone–I forget whom–speculated that Barry Bonds got into juicing to level the proverbial playing field after seeing McGwire and Sosa become superstars even though they were inferior players to him otherwise. The hypothesis goes he more or less said, “You think you guys can put up numbers and make big money with this stuff? Watch this….”
Unfortunately, much like illegal recruiting practices in college football, people in MLB cheat because it’s absolutely worth it.