FORGIVEN AND FORGOTTEN

 

               If you plan to run for just about any public office in the U.S., a platform including the words “law and order” is advisable. True, those terms haven’t been in great repute of late, but I think they still carry weight. At the least, they’re better than most alternatives.

               But while we the people are tough on crimes and criminals rhetorically, this doesn’t always describe how we behave. In sports in particular we seem quite willing to overlook or forgive, especially when the wrongdoer wears a uniform to which we pledge allegiance. Even outlanders often get the benefit of the doubt when their offenses have faded from memory sufficiently.

               I’m referring specifically to baseball and we fans’ reactions to players who have been caught doping. Seventy Major League players have been busted publicly since the game finally instituted regular testing for performance-enhancing drugs in 2005, and while most of them have been individuals of no great reputation a good-sized handful had earned “star” designations. Almost all of those guys have been greeted with applause from their home fans when they returned to action, and their misdeeds either have been forgotten by opposing audiences or never noted in the first place.

And a couple of the more-notorious dopers (albeit ones who were convicted in the court of public opinion) seem poised to be voted into the game’s Hall of Fame by sportswriters who heretofore have considered themselves to be baseball’s conscience. How’s that for a kick?

Now, it’s true that on a general level taking PEDs doesn’t rank high on any scale of heinous offenses. Some people consider the practice par for the course in big-time sports, a smart move that’s worth a shot (joke intended) and no big deal if it fails. Truth to tell, though, it’s cheating in its most base form, an eyes-wide-open decision to tilt the playing fields in the interest of padding statistics and paychecks.  The edge it confers is as real as the Houston Astros’ recently exposed sign-stealing tactics. It deserves at least equal condemnation.

 That PED use is quickly forgotten is exemplified by Starling Marte and Jorge Polanco.  Marte, an outfielder of some repute, was busted and suspended in 2017 while with the Pittsburgh Pirates. Polanco became the Minnesota Twins’ starting shortstop in 2017 at age 24 but was caught using drugs the next season. Each served 80-game suspensions, the max for the offenses. Their drugs of choice, respectively, were nandrolone and stanozolol, harry-chested steroids favored by weightlifters. No question about intent there.

But maybe because they play for small-market teams that don’t get a lot of ink, both men have blended back into the game seamlessly. Polanco was rewarded by his team with a 2019 salary that was about six times what he made the previous year and was elected by fan vote to be the American League’s starting All-Star Game shortstop. Marte also got a nice raise in Pittsburgh on his return and when he was traded to the Arizona Diamondbacks before this season his suspension was hardly noted. Interestingly, his home-run totals in his first two seasons post-steroids (22 and 23) were greater than in the years he was juicing, probably causing him to wonder why he tried the stuff.

If Marte and Polanco went quietly into suspension, Ryan Braun and Alex Rodriguez did not. Braun, a Milwaukee Brewers’ star when he tested positive for testosterone in 2012, contested the ruling on grounds his urine sample was mishandled, and won in arbitration. He screamed bloody murder, threatening to sue everyone in sight and accusing the guy who handled the sample of being anti-Semitic (Braun identifies as Jewish) and, worse, a Chicago Cubs’ fan. A year later, when he was snared again in the scandal involving the Miami performance lab Biogenesis, he shamefacedly fessed up and accepted a 65-game suspension.  Although welcomed back by Milwaukee fandom, Braun was booed elsewhere on his return in 2014, but that has faded. A 2015 All Star, he was featured in MLB ads promoting baseball’s return from this year’s pandemic, signaling that all’s been forgiven upstairs.

ARod, a towering baseball figure over a 22-year career (1994-2016), was linked to PED use from the year 2000 and admitted to taking them during a 2001-03 period, before they were banned in the game.  Finally busted in 2013, he loudly took the deny-and-sue route, going so far as to dispatch pickets to march outside the commissioner’s office on his behalf. He was banned for the entire 2014 season for taking “numerous forms” of PEDs over “multiple years.” His penalty was unprecedented.

He returned for the 2015 and ’16 seasons with diminished skills and retired from baseball, but rather than fad away he’s flourished like a green bay tree. He’s a “Shark Tank” entrepreneur and A-list party guy with world-class girlfriend Jennifer Lopez, and is part of ESPN’s broadcast crew on Sunday night baseball, it’s top slot for the sport. He’s the front man for a group trying to buy the New York Mets, something he wouldn’t be if the owners kept a grudge. Hey, given time he could be commissioner.

  Rehabilitation also might be near for Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens, the aforementioned Notorious Two.  Despite brilliant diamond careers both left the game in disgrace after their long-term drug use was widely and convincingly asserted. Although neither was convicted, each faced criminal charges for lying about it under oath, Bonds’ conviction being overturned on appeal.

Predictably, from the first both were hailed as heroes where they played; Bonds is in the San Francisco Giants’ Hall of Fame and Clemens is in the Boston Red Sox’s version of same. Election to the real Hall in Cooperstown has been more problematic. Since both became eligible in 2013 for election by the baseball writers they’ve run as a kind of ticket, each pulling about 35% of the vote in their first three years (75% is needed for election), then creeping upward annually to 61% this year.

 They’ll be on the ballot for two more years and players who’ve topped 60% with time to go usually make it over the top. Next year’s Hall crop of first-year-eligibles is weak, so that might come sooner rather than later. If it happens the question won’t be whether we forgive them but whether they forgive us.