The Contador Uncertainty Principle

“The significance of this mass ceremony…is paradoxical. It is preformed in silent privacy, in the lair of the skull. Yet each communicant is well aware that the ceremony he performs is being replicated simultaneously by thousands (or millions) of others of whose existence he is confident, yet of whose identity he has not the slightest notion.” – Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities

The problem with Alberto Contador isn’t that he’s a doper who got caught red-handed. The problem with Alberto Contador isn’t that he, cycling’s reigning champ, got blown up by a false positive, either. The problem is that he’s a mystery we’ll probably never have the facts to solve, and that he’s more harbinger than aberration. Maybe he did it, maybe he didn’t, but the whole culture has to move forward without any sort of closure. It looks like he’ll face some punishment from the UCI, he may follow through on his threat to retire, but, barring a revelation as shocking as it is unexpected, opinions will have to be formed without proof.

Here are the facts: Contador has been largely unstoppable in the grand tours since Lance Armstrong retired. He won the Tour de France in 2007, 2009 and 2010, and didn’t in 2006 and 2008 because he didn’t take part. He made up for his tour absence in 2008 by winning both the Giro d’Italia and the Vuelta a España. His teams weren’t included in the 2006 and 2008 tours because of doping investigations, but he was never individually implicated. Word came out this fall that he failed a doping control on the final rest day in the 2010 TdF, testing positive for clenbuterol, a drug that builds lean muscle. Then we learned that a urine sample from the day before that rest day tested positive for plasticizers, indicating an illegal blood transfusion or infusion.

Contador’s team claims he ate some contaminated meat gifted to him by Spanish friends during that rest day. This incensed the Spanish meat industry, which swore it was clean, and experts ruled that explanation both plausible and somewhat unlikely. (The store from whence the meat came has now been tested and shown no hint of clenbuterol, for whatever that's worth.) The plasticizer test has not been validated for anti-doping use, a fact that doesn’t impugn its accuracy but does allow anyone so inclined to cast aspersions. Complicating everything, clebuterol is sometimes present in livestock and plasticizers are environmentally present in modern life. (Remember the BPA/water bottle kerfuffle?) I’m no doctor/biochemist, but my impression is that the charges here are pretty damning, but not quite open-and-shut. Making any judgment of guilt or innocence depends at least partially on your reading of Contador’s character, motives and veracity, not simply the facts.

But, of course, the UCI can’t just let this hang over the sport like a chemical sword of Damocles. It has instructed the Spanish Federation to open hearings. What exactly will happen isn’t clear, but it’s instructive to note that a rider by the name of Fuyu Li tested positive for clebuterol last spring, and it looks like he’ll be banned for two years for his transgression. It’s one thing to offer up plausible excuses, but UCI’s doping regulations don’t care about intent. The important thing here isn’t how the clenbuterol got there, but that it was present. Contador has threatened to retire if a ban is handed down, but it’s not clear how that could be avoided if he can’t work up a little more concrete defense.


The point for me isn’t that cycling has another doping black eye. That’s pretty clear-cut. No matter how this plays out, it’s another headline where a top name is tied to drugs. The connection is always going to be louder than the details. The point is that we’ve reached the synthesis of the dialectic of doping. Unless someone does something truly stupid¹, black and white are gone forever from our drugs in sports discourse. Gone are the days when our stars were demigods, protected by their press to fit into neat (and contrived) narrative arcs, but gone also are the days when doping first barged into our collective consciousness and users were exposed simply because the authorities were now looking. In the modern cat-and-mouse arms race of doping, rumors and hints have become damning because hard facts are nearly impossible to come by.

1: People will of course do stupid things, sure as the sun rises, but the bigger the player, the more money will be spent to make the crimes smart.

As I’ve said before, I am spectacularly uninterested in vilifying individual dopers. Don’t misunderstand, I think in many ways we’re underestimating how pervasive PEDs are in sports, but I can’t get my hackles up when an athlete makes a decision that I consider regrettable but totally human. This is a problem that needs to be attacked at a sport-wide level. I’m glad that the UCI is taking doping seriously. I know that randomized doping controls are an intrusive fact of life in the peloton, but I’ll take that over unchecked cheating. But I’m not so naïve as to think that testing eliminates doping, either, or catches all dopers. It shifts it from something that is talked about in some corners of locker rooms to a furtive secret between a private trainer and athlete. If even a system as comprehensive as the UCI’s biological passport, which establishes baselines for all sorts of things I don't understand in each individual athlete and checks their tests not just for abnormal levels relative to human norms but also to all of their prior levels, can be circumvented or flawed, then there is no fail-safe test.

Which leaves those of us who are spectators, fans and media both, watching the sport with a kind of jaundiced ignorance. American fans have already seen this play out with Tyler Hamilton’s vanishing twin argument and Floyd Landis’s fan-funded defense. Anyone could be doping, because getting to the top of the heap is always going to be worth more for some athletes than moral rectitude or respecting the threat of banishment. Various figures make statements about how getting tough on doping has cleaned the sport up, but there’s no real way to evaluate the truth of such claims. How much of the peloton is doping? How much of the peloton used to be doping? If the riders don’t know, and beyond their own bodies and maybe those of their closest confidants, they don’t, how exactly are we supposed to judge at all?²

2: This is why I could never take Jose Canseco's claims about X percent of major leaguers using steroids seriously. He never gave me reason to think that he was smart enough to look beyond his own confirmation biases. (Given that he's bankrupt and tweeting about his lost chandeliers and young, hot girlfriend, he hasn't exactly forced me to reevaluate my position since.)

So what to do about this onlooker limbo? If one is properly disgusted, swearing off the sport is an option, but it’s not like it’s an isolated phenomenon. Baseball has doping, football does too, though no one cares³, I assume it’s something that goes on in hockey, and you’re just playing naïve if you think that soccer and basketball, two sports that prize athleticism and stamina, don’t have at least small portions of their players on drugs too. The edges given by chemistry are too real to ignore, and the financial rewards for success are too big for many to turn down. As long as sports are played by competitive people who are payed to succeed, athletes will dope. Sadly, it’s that simple. And in a modern world of computer-aided chemistry, there will always be a new drug that the tests don’t know about yet, but are trying to find. I’m not trying to be a downer here, but I don’t see any way that isn’t true.

3: Joe Posnanski has said that he thinks the public doesn't care about steroids in football because there's no statistic like home runs to fixate on. I think it's more that baseball is a game of individual numbers that tie the modern game seamlessly to its past, while football is a game of teams filled with masked, numbered men following coaches' orders. Player performance is too context-dependent to compare outside the player's era. The only numbers that matter are wins and losses, and the game has changed too much too quickly to ground it historically. Jimmy Foxx would still be a pretty good first baseman, it seems clear, but what would Bronco Nagurski do in the NFL today? No one could begin to guess.

Several decades (or centuries, depending on how you keep score) into the acceleration of modern communication and hence media, we’ve already endured the slow erosion of the athletes-as-role-model archetype. Penis photos make the rounds on Deadspin for those who care, and the rest of us just try to ignore it. Think of the trouble Joe Namath would have gotten into off of the field these days. Doping is the worst crime an athlete can commit against his or her sport and against our trust, but more and more we’ll have to weigh individual guilt of that crime through the lens of our opinion of the individual.


The aesthetic perfection of some sporting moments and the arbitrary nature of victory in sports often lends itself to our imbuing of sports with a false, or at least overblown, morality. Fair play transcends not breaking the rules to be a mindset and a worldview. I’m not saying that there is no value in that; parents should still tell their kids to play the game the right way. But ever since radio and then television got into pro sports and players started making real money, the love of the game for them is ancillary to the economic benefits of success. The two can compliment each other, but to expect a pro to put aside success and money to play the game “the right way” when they don't is foolish. We’ve come to terms with athletes being people, warts and all, though specific failures still disappoint us. We need to stop thinking about doping as a moral absolute and shift it into that category too, of being just one more piece of information about a person.

It’s one thing when David Millar gets caught with EPO or Ben Johnson tests positive for steroids. But those days are gone. What are we to do with Alberto Contador or the next MLB player to fail a test based what he claims is a “unauthorized ingredient in a supplement”? At least some of the time, isn’t that guy going to be telling the truth? I think it’s correct that punishment depends solely on a banned substance’s presence in a test, but we as fans and media need to come to a place where, when definitive proof can’t be found, we can figure out what to do with a professional’s reputation. If the game is now run in such a way where some significant portion of the dopers won’t get caught⁴, how is it fair to pillory those that do, especially if occasional false positives are inevitable? Hand down stiff punishments, let those who can prove innocence/guilt do so, but in the court of public opinion, let’s stop treating doping like a witchhunt and deal with the facts as they are, not as we wish they were.

4: There's a non-zero chance that Lance Armstrong, America's golden god of cycling and post-cancer heroism, doped throughout his run of dominance. He didn't get caught, so we all have to go with our gut feelings on that one, and on a lot of his rivals.

Here and There

Welcome to October, everyone. Baseball's gearing up for the postseason (or eulogizing an ending season), the NFL's getting up to speed and training camp reports are whetting our whistles for what's to come. It's an embarassment of riches, friends. To keep you company over the weekend, the new issue of Norman Einstein's is out today. Among the other worthy articles, two have some No Fours fingerprints on them:

• An examination of what, exactly, everyone got so upset about when LeBron and Chris Bosh joined Dwayne Wade in South Beach, Freedom and Agency.
  
  
• A roundtable discussion of Ken Burns's recent Tenth Inning documentary.
  

Enjoy, and get ready for the MLB postseason. As long as the Yankees don't win the Series, it should be a great time.

Draw Up a Morality Play on the Clipboard

“A work of art is useless as a flower is useless. A flower blossoms for its own joy. We gain a moment of joy by looking at it. That is all that is to be said about our relations to flowers. Of course man may sell the flower, and so make it useful to him, but this has nothing to do with the flower. It is not part of its essence. It is accidental. It is a misuse.” – Oscar Wilde

Sport is an arena populated by human beings. Human beings are, by nature, given to success and failure, kindness and pettiness, acts of grace and acts of violence. Their actions result from the best of intentions, the worst and every shade of grey in between. This is, of course, true both on and off the field of play. None of that is news; we all know it, and yet so much of the conversation about sports seems to be dedicated to ignoring that fact. Moral outrage is the currency for transgression; the dialogue demands its pound of flesh from anyone “caught” at anything it is publicly decided they shouldn’t have been doing.

The problem, it seems to me, stems from our inability to reconcile the human actors in sports with the transcendence our following of said sports sometimes provides us, what Oil Can called applied aesthetic immanence. Moments of perfection, both big and small, get under our skin. A pitcher setting a batter up and then striking him out with a perfect changeup. Your favorite team winning the championship. A guard breaking his defender’s ankles. A breakaway holding off the peloton to win the day. We all have self-constructed buttons our fandom positions us to occasionally have pushed.¹ The moments when you jump out of your seat, unable to keep from shouting and the quiet instants of knowing are what keep us coming back, keep us hooked to the games/matches/races. There is a purity at the core of this feeling, an unalloyed joy seldom allowed us anywhere else in life. Inside the moment(s) of immanence, context and contingency are swept away, unimportant, as we soak in all that we can.

1: The rarer it is that any given button gets pushed, the more import it gets. A thunderous dunk jolts you; a championship moves you. Cf. the graph in this post.

It is a betrayal of this feeling when we are reminded that the purity of an action is no guarantor of the purity of the actor. Even though the private lives and decisions of the moving parts in the setpieces of our transcendence are not our business and wholly unrelated to why and how we know them, we can’t help but care. Every morsel we learn about them informs a facet of their picture, making us feel like we have a more perfect knowledge of them and their game; when what we learn doesn’t square with the perfection of the moments we hold closest it’s easy to hold that against the athlete. If a player drives drunk or assaults someone, it has absolutely nothing to do with his game and skill on the court. There is no direct connection, but most of us nonetheless can’t shake the emotional connection we’ve constructed.

With our wall-to-wall media coverage of the famous, gotcha press tenor and the lifestyle afforded our stars by the money we indirectly pay them, the trap is continually set. Athletes will keep getting caught sleeping around on their wives, driving drunk, making poor decisions with firearms and violence and doing all of the petty, shortsighted and small things that humans as a data set will do. The same is true of any other profession, be it teachers/executives/postmen/etc, especially the rich. Any failings pros might have are compounded by a living in a bubble where every wheel is greased by money and/or fame. As Tiger Woods recently demonstrated so pyrotechnically, everything is for the taking at the top, right up until the instant it blows up in your face, be it because you went a step too far, made a stupid choice or just got unlucky. But for every guy whose cover gets blown, there are countless more who count their blessings it wasn’t their spot that got blown up.


Constructing an Echo Chamber

“In ‘punishing’ the debtor, the creditor participates in a right of the masters: at last he, too, may experience for once the exalted sensation of being allowed to despise and mistreat someone as ‘beneath him’—or at least, if the actual power and administration of punishment has already passed to the ‘authorities,’ to see him despised and mistreated. The compensation, consists in a warrant for and title to cruelty.” – Friedrich Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals

The sports media is responsible for public outrage. Everybody calibrates his or her own personal response, but we don’t get the luxury of doing it in a vacuum. When you read on the ESPN info scroll that someone is in trouble for something, you get to decide, consciously or not, whether that sets off any of your personal alarms. But to even get to that point, the story has already made it through the filter as newsworthy. If something happens and doesn’t get picked up, we don’t have a chance to get worked up about it. It’s the tree falling in the forest.

Once a story gets reported, it can vanish the next day or it can get shouted about for weeks. The gravity of the offense is certainly one of the factors here, but hardly the only one. Does it seem juicy? How famous is the player? What kind of relationship does the culprit have with the media?² How does the transgression square up with the star’s public persona? What race is he?

2: Barry Bonds is by nearly all reports a world-class ass and would have people on his case no matter what, but don’t you think he would have gotten a bit more slack if he’d been a little friendlier in the locker room throughout his career? Contrast him to Tony La Russa, who was caught dead drunk and asleep in his car at an intersection, but who got off with a misdemeanor and an apology and whose story vanished from the news cycle. (Barry's trouble, of course, also stemmed from being an angry black man, not just one unfriendly to the media, and it sure didn't hurt Tony that he was a middle-aged white dude...)

The point is that the public reacts to what they’re told, how often they’re told it and how loudly it’s told. The sporting media is not even close to impartial, but its biases don’t seem to get taken into account when they tell us to get mad about something. We don’t seem to have any critical distance from the feedback loop of noise and outrage.

Now think about team and league responses. Players get fined/suspended and pr statements are put out variously supporting and damning players. Sometimes we’re asked to respect a man/family’s privacy in a time of personal trouble, sometimes the culprit is thrown under a bus. It would be nice if the calculus were that of guilt, severity and mitigating factors, but the truth is that the only calculations are money and public relations (also known as future money). The more a player is worth, the more everyone has their back. The more they’re a burden, the faster they get thrown to the wolves. If they’re unimportant, they either are made an example of or get no words at all. Why do you think Arenas is suspended right now for finger guns and Javaris Crittenton isn’t for chambering a round?


Signal and Noise



I have no outrage in me for the private failings of sports stars. If they break the law, I want them to face whatever punishment our legal system decrees fitting. If they break a league rule, I want them to be penalized as appropriate.³ Beyond that, I don’t care. Outrage is in vogue culturally at the moment, and this is no less true in sports than elsewhere. ESPN plays to this because people pay attention. Any time a player gets targeted for anything less than a monstrous act, though, I just end up feeling sorry for the player. Sure, Mark McGwire used steroids, and I’m all for rigorous testing, but so did 20-50% of baseball (roughly), so how is it fair to hold it against only him? Clean up the system, but don’t arbitrarily crucify anyone. All right, Tiger Woods slept around on his wife, but that’s not illegal, it’s just sleazy, and how is it our business? Gilbert Arenas is going to have to deal with his guilty plea; I don’t see how punishment beyond that is fair or should be up to us.

3: This is only really true as relates to competitive fairness. I wish players weren’t muzzled by the threat of fines when talking to the media. It would be a far more interesting sports world if players could always speak their minds.

The bottom line, for me, is this: I want my sports stars to play sports. What they do with their lives beyond that simply isn’t my business. If they do something with repercussions in sports, either because it physically gets in the way of them playing or because legal ramifications impede their career, that’s germane to my fandom and I’ll pay attention. But outside of that narrow window, I’d prefer to respect their privacy rather than play the morality police. It’s just not my damn business.

The Other End of the Telescope

I didn't really want to write about the hurly-burly in the Wizards' locker room¹. There have already been more than enough words written (in this very blog, even), and if you follow basketball, you likely have an opinion already. But I had been planning to write a post about justice in professional sports, and this is in many ways an ideal test case. Besides, it's topical, so long as you're not counting in blog years.

1: If you don't know the story yet, before you read this you might want to check out this Washington Post article. It is, at least for now, where I'm getting my facts.

Foucault (from, again, The Punitive Society) identifies "In the penal system of the Classical period, ...mixed together, four great forms of punitive tactics-- four forms having different historical origins, each having played if not an exclusive role then a privileged one:
1. exile, cast out, banish, expel beyond the borders, forbid certain places, destroy the home, obliterate the birthplace, confiscate the possessions and properties;
2. arrange a compensation, impose a redemption, convert the damage caused into a debt to repay, turn the offense into a financial obligation;
3. expose, mark, wound, amputate, make a scar, stamp a sign on the face or the shoulder, impose an artificial and visible handicap, torture-- in short, seize hold of the body and inscribe upon it the marks of power;
4. confine."

Now, sports leagues exist within a wider social and governmental milieu, which limits both the mechanisms and the scope of their oversight. No matter how badly you screw up, it is strenglich verboten for the civilian employer to brand, torture, or incarcerate you. But the first two punitive tactics have pretty straightforward manifestations in suspensions and fines, respectively².

2: Okay, this linking of governmental penality and discipline in professional sports is both the most tenuous bit of my argument and its sine qua non. Professional leagues provide teams, practices, and events of an athlete's vocation; teams provide a paycheck. You could argue that their direct mechanisms of control are, instead of some governmentalistic imposition of power, simply denying what they normally provide. But, while granting that the terms of engagement determine the mechanisms of control to at least as great a degree as governmental prerogative, both are bureaucratic means of social control, which is link enough for me. I find the idea of penal systems nested like matryoshki pretty appealing for lots of reasons.

Modern penal systems of any sort "define the notion of crime, the role of the public party and the necessity of punishment... on the basis of the interest of society or the need to protect it."³ Now, I'm not aware of any not-for-profit professional sports. The working analogue for "the interest of society" is economic viability, which relies on a committed fanbase to prop up television, merchandizing, and ticket revenues. Most penal action is the low-stakes and relatively apolitical maintenance of the rules of the sport. Criticizing referees, disorderly conduct, scuffing baseballs, so on. A sport is defined by its framework of rules, and in the name of competition, sometimes people color outside the lines. But looking at what each sport goes out of its way to penalize is a great way to tell what it sees as the biggest threats to that, and often what ideals it means to hold sacred^{4, 5}.

3: idem.
4: Fuck with the sacred ideals, and you risk the passion of your fanbase, which is, once again, what makes a sport profitable. Steroids threaten the historical continuity of baseball's records; the pure exploration of the limits of human performance in track and field; the plumbing of the ragged depths of human endurance and willpower in cycling. Not so much the skill, grace, and spacial mastery of basketball or the staccato bursts of complex violence of American football.
5: What's even more interesting is when sports change their rules, rather than just enforce them. The various changes in pitching mounds and regulations, the change in hand-check rules, the introduction of the shot clock and three-point shot, even the debate about radio communication in cycling (which I bring up with no small amount of wishful thinking): all serve to make their respective sports more exciting and thus profitable.

So. Guns in a District locker room. That this blog might sound like an intact record, I won't be unpacking the racialized nature of the coverage. The important things here are: there was sensational coverage of an incident involving rich black men with guns; the NBA is terribly threatened by threatened white people. And so the Association is going to some lengths to protect itself. What I find interesting is how explicitly the political concerns trump the juridical ones. Gilbert may have been the instigator, but it was Crittenton who actually chambered a round in the locker room. His was a far more serious transgression of the norms of safety, law, and judgement every press statement is busy citing. And yet Arenas was the only one suspended, and then only after an embarrassing picture.

Arenas is well-known, though. As one of the faces of the NBA, he carries greater name recognition, and thus has greater ability to reflect poorly on the NBA. And as it happens, that is enough for the NBA rules. TrueHoop's Chris Sheridan reports:

From Article 6 of the CBA, which deals with player conduct:
Section 9. Firearms.
(a) Whenever a player is physically present at a facility or venue owned, operated, or being used by a Team, the NBA, or any League-related entity, and whenever a player is traveling on any NBA-related business, whether on behalf of the player’s Team, the NBA, or any League-related entity, such player shall not possess a firearm of any kind. For purposes of the foregoing, “a facility or venue” includes, but is not limited to: an arena; a practice facility; a Team or League office or facility; an All-Star or NBA Playoff venue; and the site of a promotional or charitable appearance.

(b) Any violation of Section 9(a) above shall be considered conduct prejudicial to the NBA under Article 35(d) of the NBA Constitution and By-Laws, and shall therefore subject the player to discipline by the NBA in accordance with such Article.

And what, you ask, does Article 35(d) say?

Here it is, in all its glorious legalese:

"The commissioner shall have the power to suspend for a definite or indefinite period, or impose a fine not exceeding $50,000, or inflict both such suspension and fine upon any player who in his opinion: (i) who shall have made or caused to be made any statement having, or that was designed to have, in effect prejudicial or detrimental to the best interests of basketball or the Association, or a member, or (ii) shall have been guilty of conduct that does not conform to standards or morality or fair play, or that does not comply at all times with federal, state and local laws, or that is prejudicial or detrimental to The Association."

Anything David Stern deems "prejudicial or detrimental to the best interests of basketball or the Association" is no less punishable than immorality, foul play, and criminal malfeasance. And so, by its own rules, while the finger guns were a physically, morally, and competitively harmless jest, they exacerbated a PR incident that played into stereotypes that are prejudicial to the Association⁶ and were penalized accordingly. Because Javaris Crittenton is not famous, he has not been the same embarrassment to the Association, and will not be unless he is found guilty of some seriously criminal behavior. But as reported by the Post, that seems unlikely:

"Preston Burton, a defense attorney and former assistant U.S. attorney in the District, said it would be difficult to build a criminal case against Crittenton based on the scenario described by the witnesses. He said prosecutors would look at factors, including whether they could prove Crittenton had a weapon, and whether the gun was real.
'It's going to be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to make a case without a gun,' Burton said."

6: Typing "the Association" evokes some menacing secret society. Every time, I feel an overwhelming urge to twirl my mustache. The Association. The Association.

But there's more to it than that. Henry Abbott, in a post well worth reading in its entirety, points out that "when you fall from grace in the NBA, you don't just fall into mediocrity. You fall into the place where the NBA must use you to define, to fans, what it is not." But, for all the intent to distance itself from the incident, pillorying Arenas "reinforces the racially-tinged notion that the NBA does have a cultural problem, instead of a few bad actors or bad moments."⁷ And he's right. It is short-sighted, even condescending. Presenting a nuanced, human view of players comes with its own problems, but if Kobe has taught us anything, it's that sheer on-court brilliance can not just overcome appalling PR hiccups, it can go on to sell literally tons of product.

7: Sadly, I had to return Prisms to the library, so no quotes, but if you can, it's worth your time to look up Adorno's essay on cultural criticism. One of its major theses is the way that critics' responses to culture ultimately reify it in counterproductive ways. It is brilliant and still awfully relevant.

In the meantime, this whole episode has at least inspired me to pick up Paradise Lost again. If y'all need me, I'll be over here, hoping every premature step of the way that "the thunder, / Winged with red lightning and impetuous rage, / Perhaps hath spent his shafts, and ceases now / To bellow through the vast and boundless Deep."

The Politics of Outrage

As you have likely heard, Manny Ramirez has recently tested positive for both hCG and synthetic testosterone. ¹ Sorting through how I feel about this, once I get past all the tattered facets of my Red Sox fandom, I get primarily to this: I’m sick of the filter the vast majority of baseball’s steroid reporting gets filtered through. Yes, steroid use in baseball is cheating, flat out. It is, in its way, morally repugnant. But I have no rage left for individual cases, and anyone that does is either trying to ignore the full picture or ginning up their feelings for effect.² I’m ready for the discourse to move on, from black and white moralizing to the nuanced discussion of performance-enhancing drugs that is the only reasonable response I can imagine in the real world.

1: I had planned on talking about the burden of proof, and how it was possible (though extremely unlikely) that Manny had taken hCG for a reason that, if not defensible, was at least foolhardy but not dishonest. This report, however, blows that need out of the water. If this is accurate, then it's pretty damn cut and dry.

2: This pair of LA Times articles reinforces my point. The writers decry the lack of fan outrage over Manny's steroid suspension. It's possible some of the fan indifference is related to Manny's persona, but I think mostly it shows how the hysteria over steroids in baseball has in large part taken place in a media echo chamber.

It never stops being a little jarring to hear about baseball’s “steroid era”. ³ The very nature of the term implies a horizon past which we will be in some new, different time. Like the dead-ball and segregated eras, baseball will evolve past this and carry with it only the truer aspects of its nature. But that’s ridiculous. A cursory look at the global sports scene will tell you that PEDs are here to stay, for concrete reasons of economic incentive, willful ignorance from parties that benefit from their use, and the weakness of the human drive for power/excellence/glory/victory. ⁴

3: It's interesting to see how different writers define the era. It seems to exist as a sliding time period that starts at some point in the late 80's/early 90's and runs, variously, up through some point between testing being introduced to the sport and the present.

4: The best point I've heard about the incentives is this Bill James remark good enough that I'm going to crib it in its entirety from this fine Joe Posnanski post. “You give me the opportunity to earn $22 million a year by taking steroids, I’ll shoot the pharmacist if I have to. I’m not saying it’s right. I’m not saying I shouldn’t be punished for shooting the pharmacist. I am saying it is self-righteous to pretend that I don’t have the same human failings that these guys do, and further, if you are insisting that you don’t have them, I don’t believe you.”

How does the narrative of steroids play out from here? I think it’s relatively instructive to look to professional cycling as an example. Bicycling is about as purely physical a sport as you’ll find. The machine is as perfect a machine as ever devised to turn human effort into velocity. Though the actual racing is a complicated team game of strategy, at its base, a bicyclist’s currency is simply his ability to ride his bike at speed for a prolonged period of time, and this capacity can be significantly boosted through a variety of chemical means.

Doping has dogged cycling since the early days of the 20th century, but things boiled to a head at the 1998 Tour de France, and were cemented by the swirling rumors around Lance Armstrong, Operation Puerto, and Floyd Landis. At this point, the sport has a system of random, repeated testing with draconian penalties for failing any tests. And yet people are still caught. Tests and penalties don’t get rid of doping. They certainly tamp it down, but the incentives are still too great if you’re a guy who feels like it’s your only shot of making your dream, or if you’re the guy with a chip on his shoulder from always coming up just a bit short. Or even if you’re a guy looking for every edge you can find.

The current leader of the Giro d’Italia is Alessandro Petacchi, a man who just came back from a inhaler-related suspension. He had permission to use his inhaler, but his levels tested at above acceptable limits. Maybe he accidentally took too much, or his body reacted in an odd way and retained the drug.⁵ Maybe he was trying to pull a fast one. There’s no real way of knowing, and that’s my point. The advantages in professional sports can be razor-thin. It’s ridiculous to try and talk about PEDs as if an athlete either is clean or has steroids (or oxygen-vector drugs or whatever) coursing through his or her veins. There’s a continuum, with a vast, hazy middle in which most athletes will by necessity operate. No one will ever be able to prove a negative. In cycling, an athlete can get dinged, spend one or two years suspended, and then get on with his career. Petacchi refers to his suspension as a “parenthesis in [his] cycling career”. Alexandre Vinokourov wants to race again when his suspension ends. ⁶ Any individual athlete’s reveal as guilty can cause recrimination from his fans and team, but on a more macro level, it’s understood that this a sad fact of how the world now works, and maybe always has.

5: It's worth a quick note here that I have no particular knowledge about how drugs interact with the body, and whether or not this is even possible. But I doubt you do, either, unless you are a doctor or work for the WADA.

6: Vino, when he was in his prime, was amazing. A rider who had to be feared less for his ability, though he certainly was good, than for the fact that if he decided to attack, he would absolutely turn himself into a missile. In the 2003 Tour de France, especially, he would attack, get reeled back in, and bide his time just long enough to get up the strength to attack again. It wasn't the smartest riding I've ever seen, but it was electrifying.

So Manny Ramirez. Responses have been all over the map, but the most interesting have been the realpolitik analyses of the Dodger’s new position. They save $7m in salary they had budgeted for Manny. If they can hold on decently without him, they could potentially use that money to pick up another arm or piece the team needs later in the season and be in even better position come playoff time. Not that such a thing is what they had planned or would want, but it’s where they are. Players have taken drugs, players are taking drugs, and players will take drugs. If that doesn’t get legalized, that means that sometimes players will get caught and punished, and teams and fans will have to deal with the fallout. This is not a temporary situation, but it’s also not the end of anything but the false innocence born of willful ignorance. In a world of imperfect people, what makes sport perfect isn’t the people playing it, but how the game makes their imperfections beside the point.