Will baseball withstand cheaters?

With the Mitchell Report on Baseball’s steroid problem due out today, I’m wondering if game of baseball will actually change.

I have been a fan of Americas game since I was a kid. It was the first sport I was exposed to, it was the first sport that I could actually participate in. It is open to both boys and girls. What could be more fair and equal than that?

It is not unusual to drive through any community in the U.S. and see groups of kids playing baseball. In fact the game reaches around the world.

Growing up at a time when morals and ethics were actually being taught in the home, kids were very much against cheaters. If you didn’t play fair, you didn’t play.

As players begin emerging from the crowd as possible super stars of the game, the crowds cheer them on. Some of those players go on to break records. We cheer even louder and push them to attain even greater heights. This is what fans love about sports, stellar performances and breaking records and making the impossible plays. Every fan dreams of watching another human tear down a long standing record and we cheer them on as if they were heroes.

But fans have one overriding rule that does not need to be vocalized because we all grew up with it as the cornerstone for everything we know is right and just, you can not cheat.

When that record-breaking human is found to have used performance enhancing drugs to perform that impossible feat, fans lose respect for the player. The cheers become jeers. And a little more of our faith in humanity is torn down.

As we grow up the stakes become higher, there is major money involved from the sport they love and sponsor endorsements. There is constant pressure from the front office to perform beyond their means so their investment pays off, and there is constant pressure from the fans to become a sports legend. This last pressure is, I think, more in the players head because true fans just love to watch the strategy of the game being played out.

Athletes turn to performance enhancing drugs to help alleviate these mounting pressures. Fairness becomes no more than a childish thing to hold onto. The drive to be number one is a powerful force and ethics can be easily trampled into the dust of the playing field. The virtuous players get left behind, uncelebrated.

Before steroids came along, records were made and broken by muscle and sheer effort, the true essence of sport.

What is it about these guys today who feel they cannot reach those records on their own strength and ability? What drives them to shun this very basic rule of sports and subject themselves to the stigma of being a cheater?

Is the stigma of being a cheater being lessened by what we are repeatedly exposed to in the daily news? CEO’s cheat and steal from their own employees. Politicians cheat and lie to their own constituents. Religious leaders have forsaken moral values for their personal weaknesses. The poor and rich alike will steal and cheat to get ahead. Is it no surprise that the world of sports is riddled with these same low moral and ethical people?

The answers to these questions is the subject of psychology and I certainly am not equipped to address them. Although, I suspect it has a lot to do with ego and self image.

Just the fact that steroid use could lead to severe body damage such as liver cancer, steroid rage, testicular atrophy, torn tendons, osteoarthritis, just to name a few of the more serious side effects, shows the extent to which a person will go for fame.

Whatever their justification for using drugs, these cheaters should be banned from baseball forever and their records taken down. And not just baseball, there is no place for cheaters in any sport.

This game of baseball is still Americas game. I hope it can withstand this ‘black tide of cheaters’ and not lose more fans.