Since the steroids controversy has flared up again thanks to Barry Bonds, I thought I'd raise again the question that I posed in a Wired essay last year: why are steroids against the rules while enhancement surgeries -- like laser eye surgery -- are completely legit? Shouldn't it be more of an offense to permanently alter your body in order to improve performance?

Finally, new surgical procedures will be so effective and feature such rapid recovery time that Tommy John surgery will look like bloodletting by comparison. In fact, there's a chance you've had one of these next-generation procedures: laser eye surgery. Great hitters anticipate the type of pitch being thrown - fastball or curveball? - by detecting the rotation of the seams of the baseball, which means that good eyesight is as valuable to them as strength or agility. One study of more than a dozen players who had opted for laser surgery found that "players coming off eye surgery are likely to see substantial improvements in batting average and power."

Comments

[llimllib]

I'd hope that steroids are against the rules because the drugs are detrimental to the user's health. Healthy eating and a good workout regimen /permanently/ alter an athlete's body as well, should we ban those?

[another_white_boy]

drugs are baaaaad. mmmmmkay?

don't be a douche-bag!!!

[amosbray]

I've been thinking about this issue a fair amount in the past year or so. I think the issue you raise is an interesting one, though I hadn't seen your earlier article so you may already have addressed my musings. I've been troubled by Bonds and Palmiero and McGuire et al and yet hadn't been able to put my finger on why. I'm still not sure I know, but I suspect it has to do with baseball's curious relationship to history, legend, and myth. Baseball is a kind of monolith, no less inscrutable than Kubrick's, and one of the pegs admirers try to use as a handhold is statistics and the relativity that links player A from that era to player B from this era. If Player A wore glasses (which of course he didn't... if we're just sticking with hitters for the moment, what great hitter wore glasses?) or okay let's say sunglasses, that's fair, games back in the eras before TV were played in the daytime for the most part, so if Player A wears his sunglasses to accommodate his disadvantage, then we compare that with Player B wearing polarized Nike optics or contact lenses or yes even laser eye surgery (the issue of permanence vs impermanence is the topic of your post but it's a little outside the boundaries of mine!), that's somehow a fair comparison. I don't know why. The technology to improve eyesight is better now, will no doubt be better in the future, and will be allowed as legal and legitimate. (Where would we draw the line? A bionic eye that enabled the hitter to focus his 400mm zoom lens right on the seams of the baseball in the pitcher's hand? 200mm is okay but 400mm is out because you can basically see through the stitching on his glove how he's holding the ball.) But anything that changes the genetic structure in such an immediate way that you can reverse the course of evolution to enable a 35+ year old player to start improving in a way no similar player has ever done before, I think there are two things operating:

1) it doesn't seem like an accomplishment; it's just a purchase (I'll take 5 more home runs this year... no, wait, let's splurge, let's make it 10)
2) you lose all (you're going to lose some with each generation, of course), and I mean ALL, connection to the historical, legendary, mythical accomplishments that make up the baseball narrative

In the case of number 1, I hadn't thought about that before but I think its effect on the baseball connoisseur at large can't be underestimated. In the case of number 2, the original point I was lurching toward, the links, the connections between players of the past, present, and future are not forged in steel, but neither can they become so tenuous that they break with a finger twitch. And I suspect, rightly or wrongly, that is what is troubling about the actions of Bonds and others.

Finally, no one who is not a professional athlete can possibly know what it is like to experience the elation of supreme performance and then endure its decline, usually and with extremely few exceptions across an absurdly brief timespan. For whatever reason, if an athlete once tried something that allowed them to turn the clock back, to recover more quickly after a performance, to feel the kind of strength they hadn't known for 10 years if ever, who knows what powerful, perhaps even irresistible, temptation that would be. Worth risking everything for? Who knows.

[collin]

One fairly obvious point worth making in this context is that bad eyesight is seen as a flaw that can be corrected, while steroids are perceived as going beyond what is naturally possible without them, i.e., as excess.

With the information that came out this year about (football) linemen's life expectancies, I'm surprised that there hasn't been more discussion about the image of perfection that particular sports promote, and the effect that, even without steroids, it can have on the bodies of athletes.

cgb

[Bill Dauphin]

The conversation about "performance enhancing" substances/practices reminds me strangely of the controversy over genetically modified animals/crops: They're both based on the same false dichotomy between "artificial" and "natural."

Just as all domesticated plants and animals are really genetically modified, whether through the slow and tedious "natural" methods of selective breeding and culling or the "artificial" methods of the laboratory, so to are all elite athletes "performance enhanced" compared to non-athletes. At first glance, it might seem easy to differentiate between "natural" performance-enhancing measure (i.e., special diets, exercise regimes, training, physical therapy, sports psychology)and "artificial" ones such as drugs and surgical body modification... but on closer inspection, such distinctions can seem pretty arbitrary. During the recent Winter Olympics, several cross-country skiiers were temporarily suspended because of elevated hemoglobin levels. My understanding is that these levels might result from illegal doping... but they might also result from "natural" causes, including high-altitude training.

Because the raison d'etre of sports is competition, and some basic standard of fairness is essential to competitive integrity, I think there is a basis for discriminating between performance enhancing measures... but based on equal access, rather than on the imagined moral superiority of "natural" methods: An athlete shouldn't feel compelled to become a criminal in order to have a fair chance of winning, so it's reasonable to ban illegal drugs; an athlete shouldn't feel compelled to risk his/her life for sport, so it's reasonable to ban life-threatening practices. (Note that the latter does not imply that merely unhealthy practices should be banned: By the standards of "normal life," much of what elite athletes do with regard to training and diet could be called unhealthy.)

Under my model, illegal steroids should be banned, NOT because they're "performance enhancing," but because allowing their use would put athletes unwilling to engage in criminal behavior at an unfair disadvantage, and thereby damage the basic competitve equity of the sport. Substances that are legal (e.g., anything you can buy at a GNC store) should NOT be banned, regardless of their "performance enhancing" characteristics, and substances that are illegal but not performance enhancing should not be specifically banned by sporting organizations. (That is, Ricky Williams' fondness for the ganja is between him and the cops, but to my mind no business of the NFL's, unless you can convince me that smoking dope makes him a better football player.)

As for eye surgery and other "artificial" enhancements, I say as long as they're freely available to all and don't present any extreme risks, there's no reason to restrict them.

Of course, I'm the commissioner of exactly nothing! ;^)

[lillie]

Steroids are illegal to a large extent not only because they are damaging in long term to the person who use them but also inderectly can affect others because people who uses steroids tend to be more agressive. It's no coincidence that the prisons are full of people convicted for violent and often cruel crimes who have pumped steroids, one may perhaps argue that the rationale for this would not work for sports because there the person would have a channel for his/her agressivity but I guess it would really be flawed.

Quoting Collin:
"That is, Ricky Williams' fondness for the ganja is between him and the cops, but to my mind no business of the NFL's, unless you can convince me that smoking dope makes him a better football player"

Well when the desire for next fix hits he'd perhaps be, otherwise dopeheads are rather calm people ;)

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