Just read this article about Aaron Judge’s 62nd HR in the context of the steroid era and the pre-integration era etc. It reminded me of my “Bonds” essay that I wrote in July 2005, suggesting that media/congressional concern over steroids in baseball and inflated home run numbers related to a much larger bubble that would probably soon burst, which turned out true with the 2008 financial crisis in part caused by inflated home prices. The essay first appeared in Barrelhouse‘s second issue, then in The Best American Non-Required Reading 2007, and in a Barrelhouse anthology too. Just realized it isn’t actually online so figured I’d rectify that . . .
On July 6, 2005, Girlfriend and I drove to Fairfield, Iowa, home of the Maharishi University of Management (mum.edu), a business and spirituality school led by His Holiness Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. A distinctly Vedic-flavored Midwestern town, Fairfield is famous for rumors of rampant levitation among its citizenry—a significant thematic fact, considering that this essay’s final sentences offer some thoughts about transcendence in a freaked-out world. Please realize the following isn’t about rampantly levitating New Age Freaks in Fairfield, Iowa; it’s more about the ocean of corn (and maybe an iceberg lurking somewhere in it?) we saw when we drove to Fairfield two days ago. You know the old saying about how the corn’s knee high by the Fourth of July? Well, as we drove through southeast Iowa to see the levitators of Fairfield, we passed not much knee-high corn, a whole lot of the eye-high stuff, and a handful of cornstalks so impressive you wanted to uproot one, take it home, and hang a basketball hoop from it.
The sight of sky-high cornstalks made Girlfriend say: “No wonder nine-year-olds menstruate these days.”
To which I replied: “Huh?”
“All the hormones in food,” she said, “they hit puberty when they’re like nine.”
This exchange inspired what I thought might be the first line of an essay I’d been gearing up to write for months: “If Barry Bonds were a vegetable, he’d be the biggest, reddest, juiciest tomato that ever made your daughter bleed before her time.”
Bonds
Much is made of steroid use by home-run hitters. People say their records are tainted. People say these guys are terrible role models. People say they’re cheaters. And yet, in ever-earnest Iowa, the corn is sky-high two days after a birthday celebration for a country in which televisions are now how many inches wide? XXXL is not so uncommon a size. Instead of Mustang, Pinto, Bug, or Beetle, today’s enormous cars are called Sequoia, Tundra, Rainier, and Yukon (not to mention the environmentally evocative Avalanche). Our armed forces’ capabilities to kill, often while miles out of retaliation’s reach, seem downright Atarian, if not PlayStation2ian. Our meal portions are famously super-sized, occasionally complemented with vegetables that make children hit puberty before they can spell menstruate. And who best personifies all this?
Barry Bonds, of course. He who grew up around the professional game. Whose father (Bobby) and godfather (Willie Mays) are baseball legends. Who worked hard. Who excelled at every level he played. Who at age 37 hit 73 homers in one year and seemed on track to shatter Henry Aaron’s career home run record. Except he was on steroids, supposedly. You know all this. No need to waste words. But the thing to think about when you think about the effect steroids may have had on Barry Bonds, I think, is that since Little League he’s always been one of the best, if not the best.
Imagine you, like me, know what it’s like to be one of the best Little Leaguers. Imagine you know what it’s like to take the mound and win a high school state championship. Imagine you know what it’s like to strike out fourteen in a 21-out college game against the #10-ranked Division III team in the country. Imagine you know what it’s like to dominate. Imagine you excelled at pitching for thirteen years, but you didn’t take your game to the next level, didn’t spend your spare time lifting and running and throwing weighted balls to increase your heater’s speed seven measly miles per hour so it’d hit ninety on the radar gun. When you threw a slider at a righty’s head, they bailed in fear, called out on strikes as the ball cut across the zone. When you threw a curve, it looped so high and dropped so quickly field umps often said “wow” as they tipped the pointy brims of their tiny black caps. When you threw a forkball, it tumbled and fell without much rotation, sometimes skidding unpredictably like a knuckleball. But your fastball, your 83-MPH heater, college kids caught up with it. It was more than fast enough in high school. But not in college, not even in Division III.
Faced with college-level competition, you didn’t work harder on and off the field. You definitely didn’t live in the weight room. You, like everyone you’ve ever played with, didn’t do what Barry Bonds did. Instead, like everyone you’ve ever played with, your interest switched to something else. In my case, guitar. Barry Bonds, meanwhile, committed himself to transforming his natural baseball talent into something almost scary. And it was this drive to be baseball’s best—not just of his era, but of all time—that may have compelled him to take a legal substance widely used by power hitters and pitchers alike, a substance on which he began to compete more with history than with contemporaries, who once walked him 232 times in a season, he was that good.
And being that good made people who could never play baseball well in Little League, let alone the high school, college, or professional levels—let alone drunken games of Wiffle Ball—question an ability that seemed to raise the bar high over the head of even the greatest hitters of old. Forget that The Babe hit in a stadium known as “The House that Ruth Built,” famous for its short porch in right over which he hit many a home run. Babe Ruth lived on hot dogs and beer, not steroids, so it’s okay, or so people say. Having a stadium built to your advantage is not cheating.
Further, how many of Bonds’ home runs just barely cleared the fence? Mostly they were towering shots into the water over the bleachers in right. Home runs anywhere. And how many homers would he have had if pitchers actually pitched to him? Instead, they never came close to throwing him strikes, so intimidated they were by his stroke, which was not built on steroids alone: Bonds worked out one winter with David Eckstein because Barry admired the pesky infielder’s bat speed . . .
Enough Theory, Let’s Practice
Try this at home: (1) sniff out the cell phone number of your neighborhood’s performance-enhancing drug dealer, (2) shoot some steroids into your limp office-worker limbs, (3) go stand in the batter’s box as some lanky Dominican, Venezuelan, or Texan, out of his mind on amphetamines, cranks 95 MPH heaters high and tight, and (4) try even touching one of these pitches. C’mon, let’s see you get some wood on an 87 MPH changeup. Let’s see you play in front of tens of thousands of people every day every summer for a dozen years while wearing clingy pinstriped pants completed with little elastic stirrups.
Before you find that cell-phone number, imagine for a second all the work it’d take to go from watching your fantasy baseball stat tracker and popping your steroids to hitting a ball into the water over the right-field bleachers and trotting around the bases just once in real life. (Bonds currently has 703 home runs.) Imagine all the work it’d take just to hit one out. Imagine going back in time to when you were six. Imagine hanging all day with Willie Mays (often considered the best of the best) and Bobby Bonds (not to mention your dad’s teammates: sluggers Willie Stargell, Dave Parker, etc), these guys giving you hitting tips long before you knew how to spell the word cheating. Imagine every pitch you crushed from age seven onward. Imagine all the time in the weight room. All the time running. All the time studying pitchers. All the time denying indulgences because it’s baseball season. Imagine all the flights around the country. Imagine all the home runs. All the cheers. Imagine all this happening before you decide to take some hormonal supplement to make it easier to work out to compensate for natural aging processes. Imagine the confidence you’d have knowing how well you’re working out these days thanks to the juice. Imagine the swagger. Imagine standing in the batter’s box, your arm (usually exposed to the bean balls scared pitchers throw in self-defense) now covered in gladiator-like armor. Just imagine what it’d be like to play the game for two decades before you ever took any sort of hormonal enhancement . . .
Now imagine everyone turning on you. Writing off all those years of work that enhanced your natural talent. Writing you off because you took a drug late in your career that helped you work harder and perform better. A drug the pitchers took, too. Imagine they make you the poster boy for steroids, citing the obvious symptom of the long ball, while half of everyone bitching is on antidepressant pills. While Roger Clemens and Curt Schilling slide by unnoticed, these huge aging aggressive strikeout pitchers who you just know are juiced. While a steroid-addled Rafael Palmiero cashes in on his 500 home runs by appearing in ads for Viagra ($4000 of which he donated to George W.’s reelection campaign, by the way). While you spurn the posturing required to win endorsements. No different from Ted Williams, controversy has always fueled your performance. You thrive when it’s you against the world, and so you bark at the media, talk trash, and antagonize your teammates, just so it’ll spur you on to win. You fight with everyone to improve your game. Everything you do you do to make your game better.
And that’s your fatal flaw. All those years of work, all those batting tips from Mays, Stargell, Parker, etc, the seven MVPs, the eight Gold Gloves, the thirteen All-Star games, the thirteen consecutive years hitting 30 or more homers, the single-season on-base percentage record of .609 (!), being the all-time leader in walks (holding the single-season record for walks in a season with 232 [my god], as well as the record for intentional walks with 120), not to mention hitting 73 homers in a season and being one of only three human beings ever to hit more than 700 homers in their careers, all these records and awards and years of commitment to the game mean absolutely freakin’ nothing because you, like everyone else in the league at the time, it seemed, took what was available to make yourself better. And since you were already better than everyone, it made you better than anyone ever, and that didn’t sit well with some people who envied what you could do. The drive that got you where you are destroyed your reputation. Similar ambition has caused the fall of empires.
Sky High
But, hey, it’s not like you’re Dock Ellis, who in the early seventies threw a no-hitter on acid, who also took a handful of uppers every time he hit the mound, like so many others. You weren’t tripping out there. You were working. In fact, you were a lot like this little black boy from the Pacific Northwest who loved his guitar so much he slept with it, who played and played, who spent most of his time in the Air Force playing guitar, who traveled all around the south playing guitar, who played rhythm guitar for the Isley Brothers and Little Richard, who played in New York in the mid-sixties under the name Jimmy James until certain performance-enhancing drugs entered the scene and all that talent and all that work met all those drugs, transforming Jimmy James into the most exciting guitar player Brian Jones of The Stones had ever heard, or so he said when he introduced the relatively unknown Jimi at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967. Ever hear the rumor that Hendrix sliced his forehead with a razor blade then pressed tabs of acid to the slit he then tied down with a headscarf so the hallucinogen seeped directly to his brain as he played? Ever hear Jimi’s rhythm playing on “Wait Until Tomorrow”? Ever hear the bombs dropping toward the end of “Machine Gun” on the Band of Gypsys album?
The comparison between Bonds and Jimi is clear: natural talent + obsessive work/play + performance-enhancing drugs = godlike greatness.
In both cases, it wasn’t just the acid or the steroids that created the legend. The equation is so much more complicated than just simple addition involving drugs. Mind-blowing performance was founded on sleeping with baseball bats and guitars, years of obsessive practice, tons of natural talent, and then (and only then), the drugs.
Think of the Beatles before Rubber Soul. Myth has it that Dylan intervened, performing two of the most important miracles in the history of rock: (1) “why are you guys singing that ‘love me do’ crap,” he supposedly said, “you’re too good for that,” and (2) he introduced the mop-headed musicians to weed. What came next? “Norwegian Wood” on Rubber Soul. And after that? Revolver, which (like Bonds and Jimi) some call the greatest. Which reminds me of Bill Hicks’s stand-up routine about “the war on drugs,” how all great music was played by people on drugs, and so if you’re against drugs, the first thing you should do is take all those great albums by The Beatles and The Stones and burn them, because they were all made while everyone involved was “real high on drugs.”
Like Bonds, I played baseball. And like Jimi and The Beatles and The Stones, years ago, once or twice, I may have played some music in a somewhat addled state. But it didn’t transform what natural talent I had into something special. Most likely, steroids wouldn’t have helped my pitching much either.
So where does that leave us?
Bombs
Right after I typed that question, I got an IM from a friend in London:
FRIEND: p.s. i’m alive
ME: huh
FRIEND: seen the news?
ME: you won the olympics bid!
FRIEND: are you joking?
FRIEND: did you just wake up?
ME: i just checked nyt.com
ME: shit
FRIEND: right
FRIEND: six bombs
FRIEND: and a scare in my street
ME: shit
FRIEND: just got back in the house
FRIEND: it ain’t 3000 people, but we’re scared
FRIEND: they think about 50 or so dead
FRIEND: about a 1000 injured
FRIEND: some critically
FRIEND: we’ve been waiting for ages and now it’s here
ME: i’m reading this now—the tube—damn
FRIEND: yeah
Tragedy so weirdly appeared when I was paused after that Hendrix/Beatles-on-drugs rant, trying to figure out how to steer the argument toward the bigger picture. And, lo, an eerie segue materialized to provide the following simple idea: who cares if some idiot kid is influenced to take steroids to make his fastball hit the nineties when this idiot kid lives in a world where idiots try to enhance their ideological performance with explosives, whether it be the bad guy’s makeshift sack of dynamite on a double-decker bus or the good guy’s million-dollar missiles jettisoned from miles away as though playing some “graphically rich” evolution of Atari’s Defender. (Make no mention of the good guy’s weapons of mass destruction set to destroy all life on the planet how many hundreds of times over was it again?)
I swear there’s a connection here. I swear there’s something that makes steroid use defendable as an evil so lesser it’s comparatively angelic. I swear Barry Bonds is a scapegoat for larger troubles. Compare with any sort of warfare the significance of Barry Bonds juicing himself—like Robert Johnson selling his soul to the Devil so he can play guitar better than no one ever done before—so baseball fans around the country can come away from a game saying those inflated ticket prices were worth it to see Bonds hit a five-hundred-foot moon shot. Compare steroid use with “shock and awe” in Afghanistan and Iraq, with Al Qaeda’s actions in New York, Washington, Madrid, and now London. Imagine you’ve been orphaned by an American missile. Imagine you’ve consequently developed a hatred for the United States, a hatred you sleep with every night beside you in bed. You work at that hatred, plan to unleash that hatred, and then there’s an opportunity to get your filled-with-hatred hands on something abstractly analogous to performance-enhancing drugs: Instead of Barry Bonds with steroids and a mighty baseball bat in his hands, imagine you’re some anonymous terrorist with uranium and a mighty hatred of America in his heart. The wonder of the bombings in London and Madrid is that both have been surprisingly rinky-dink compared to the expectation of an atomic blast.
The inevitability of a devastating urban strike has nothing directly to do with Barry Bonds’s steroid-addled assault on the home-run record. But tainted homers, I think, are a sliver of something more invasive, if only in that we focus on overinflated home-run records because the scandal distracts from the overinflation of American bodies, the overinflation of houses, the overinflation of cars, the overinflation of our armed forces’ capabilities, the overinflation of patriotic self-importance, the overinflation of self-righteous nationalistic cluelessness, the overinflation of a sort of laziness that makes you think you can get results without any effort (that makes people think baseball players simply stand at the plate on steroids and hit homers without the physical memory of two dozen years of effort and experience having anything at all to do with how far the ball soars), and, finally, of course, we focus on overinflated home-run hitters instead of the overinflation of performance-enhanced produce that makes our daughters’ bodies mature way before their prime.
But what about their minds?
Here’s where I offer some thoughts about transcendence in a world in which joys as simple as the home run, the corn cob, and the tomato are tainted. Why do we question the long ball more than international difficulties caused by an out-of-control addiction to oil that makes us a sedentary society that drives to fast-food chains and then wants pharmaceutical companies to offer obesity pills that don’t make us poo our pants? Why do we holler about some naturally gifted, hard-working athlete’s semi-unnatural ability to hit a baseball hundreds of feet over a fence when a simple foot would do? How might one transcend the hypocrisy of booing Bonds when his homers are no more bloated than most everything else? Maybe by driving to weird places like Fairfield, Iowa, where no Al Qaeda member would ever think to strike, where the drug of choice is surely crystal meth (or Maharishi mind warp), where a hot-air balloon hung over town as we walked around the gazebo on which leaned a lonely saxophonist who sent overly enlightened licks into the summer air, where the Thai food was really remarkably good.
What I mean to say is that, like in Fairfield, Iowa—where so many fliers for transcendental-meditation sessions hang around the traditional midwestern town square—maybe the only way to transcend the hypocrisy is to expect your home run hitters to take performance-enhancing drugs, sort of like tribal shamans reflecting the current state of the world. If everything’s naturalness can be questioned, please don’t deride one man’s ability for doing something as pleasurable and benign as hitting dingers unless you’re consciously singling out Bonds & Friends because you believe sports are an alternate reality where steroids stand in for everything in the world that’s wrong that you’d like changed but don’t have a clue where to start. But if you see steroids in baseball as part of a whole in which even the tomatoes are juiced, maybe it’s better if puberty begins when kids are no older than ten. Maybe a head start on the maturation process will make it easier to realize that steroids are not even the tip of that icy impediment up ahead of our bloated American boat.
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To support the kind publishers who have taken a chance on my writing, please acquire a copy of Neutral Evil ))) and/or JRZDVLZ. Or my translation of Horacio Castellanos Moya’s Revulsion: Thomas Bernhard in San Salvador. Or Thanks + Sorry + Good Luck: Rejection Letters From the Eyeshot Outbox directly from the publisher. Or even a copy of The Shimmering Go-Between directly from me (the publisher is kaput).