It may not be a question of how far you fall, but how you land that really counts. But the fact of the matter is baseball, after being thrown over the cliff performance-enhancing substances last year, has fallen a little too far and landed a little too awkwardly.
They're calling it baseball's power outage, among many other things. Whatever the phrasing, the truth is that when it comes to hitting the long ball, players aren't really stepping up to the plate. This year, home run percentages are down and overall slugging percentages are down and, as mentioned in my last post, since there is a direct (but usually seasonally delayed) correlation between home runs and attendance, it looks like the owners, who spent this past spring shouting about steroids, will be screaming a different tune this time next year.
But that's not the only category that has suffered. As it turns out this year's tally of road wins are nothing to be proud of, not to mention the number of players currently on the disabled list and the number of pitching relievers who have apparently "lost" their fastballs.
The grumblings among players is that the real loss is not just the steroids, but the pain of being denied the pep pills known as "greenies." In times past, amphetamines have been dispensed in baseball like jelly beans. It used to be that trainers, managers, friends and family used to carry hundreds of these pills around for anyone who wanted. There were veteran stories of clubhouses serving drug-laden coffee (because, really folks, with the 7,598 or however many games there are in a damn long baseball season, caffeine just won't cut it) and veteran stories of much worse.
Those days are gone. And, no great surprise, easy to come by road wins (after flights that get in past 4:00 am with 1:00 pm start times the next day) have vanished as well. And it's only June.
The season has three months to go and these away game numbers are not about to start climbing upward anytime soon. Even worse, while the direct correlation between now banned steroids and a drop in home runs is the topic that seems to be on everyone's mind these days, the real trouble may be still to come. That's because, besides increasing strength and stamina, steroids are a fantastic injury recovery technology.
Since pep pills often work both as a speed rush an as an analgesic dampener, players with nagging injuries are going to have slower recovery times and no pharmacological aid to help them fight through the pain.
That is, except cortisone shots, which have arguably done more damage to player's bodies than all the steroids now missing from baseball. So if you're looking for a moral in all this, then perhaps you should look no farther than Ralph Waldo Emerson who once said, "We forge the chains that bind us."
Simply put, our National Pastime has forged some mighty heavy chains as of late. Turns out, it's hard to run the bases with all that metal clanking around player's ankles.
