The debate about whether (alleged) steroid users Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens should be in the Baseball Hall of Fame — answered again this week, barely, with a “no” — should catalyze a broader discussion of the importance of integrity.
For now, please allow just a few thoughts about, or against, some of the arguments frequently seen in recent days in those players’ favor. As a matter of normative ethics, the arguments are startlingly off-base.
For discussion’s sake, let’s assume the allegations against Bonds and Clemens are uncontested. Indeed, most of the public pleas in their favor actually do assume, based on rather convincing evidence (if not proof), that both players were substantial users of performance-enhancing drugs. Instead, the Bonds-Clemens supporters say their steroid use really shouldn’t matter.
The first common argument, that steroid use “wasn’t against baseball’s rules at the time,” is flat-out false. Baseball banned steroids in 1991. Equally importantly, Congress made nonprescription steroid use illegal in 1990. Baseball players who used PEDs were breaking both the rules and the law.
The second big argument is one of greater cultural concern. It’s the old “everybody else was doing it” excuse. (Never mind that the large majority of major leaguers almost certainly were not using PEDs, even if too many would-be superstars did.) Ethically, this is and always has been a bankrupt contention. The reason so many parents tell children that misbehavior isn’t all-right just because others are misbehaving is simple: It’s true.
Then there’s the contention that fellow players tacitly accepted steroid use and that somehow PED use was justified in order to achieve great results for one’s team. Balderdash. Curt Schilling produced one of the most superlative pitching records in baseball history, while Ken Griffey Jr. and Frank Thomas hit 630 and 521 home runs, respectively, all while publicly crusading against PED use and showing zero evidence of using. Their teams all made postseason runs, and Schilling’s teams famously won three World Series titles.
Finally, there’s the argument that other players of generally objectionable character — the stridently racist Ty Cobb, the compulsive gambler and klansman Rogers Hornsby, and peddler of antisemitic conspiracy theories Steve Carlton among them — are in the Hall of Fame, so why not Clemens and Bonds? This leads to the most important ethical point of all, and it’s where the much longer discussion of integrity has to begin.
The very, very short version is that the steroid users didn’t just behave badly — they substantially dishonored the game itself. It is one thing to say objectionable things (Schilling and Carlton both have), but it is quite another to upend completely the competitive balance and basic sportsmanship of baseball, then expect to be honored for it.
Indeed, this goes beyond the rules and the federal laws making steroids verboten into an inherent choice between right and wrong.
For decades before steroids were banned, everybody knew they were dangerous substances that produced unnatural, indeed nearly superhuman, competitive results. For just that reason, the Olympics banned steroids way back in 1967. (Enforcement at that time was, admittedly, laughable.) The very ideal of sport writ large is inexorably entwined with the paradigm of natural talent developed through the hard, honest work of self-improvement.
Every single steroid user knows he or she is taking a dishonest shortcut. Every single steroid user is trampling honest sportsmanship. In using steroids, players forfeit respect, not to mention formal honors and any place among the game’s list of immortals.
