This week started with you making the case for steroids to be legal. This is the argument I inartfully referred to in my "this disproves your other arguments" statement (which dragged me down in to the hyperbolic as well. If I could strike that sentence from the record I would). I still do not think you have made the argument that we should remove the barriers of steroid use, for all of the previous reasons we've discussed, but I am on board that this is not a "steroids are always bad/surgery always good" dichotomy. I agree that there are specific instances where some players could be praised for taking steroids.
One thing I realized in the course of this discussion is we are arguing about the difference between damage done "naturally" and damage done chemically. I imagine the specific instance where a player could be praised would involve taking steroids because of a specific injury or condition, and the steroids are the difference between being a productive athlete and not playing at all. We would view the short term gain, for the team, as something to be praised, and feel pity for the athlete after the fact when the side-effects took hold. I can get on board with all of this.
Where you still lose me is saying that Tommy John and steroids can be viewed in the same lens. If anything the Tommy John example is the converse of the steroids example. In the same way that we can imagine a specific instance where steroids would be laudable, we can also imagine a very narrow specific instance where Tommy John would be considered bad.
I would not be in favor of a player, if his elbow was fine, deciding to get Tommy John surgery. In my mind the Tommy John surgery needs to be a specific response TO something. But once that something happens I see nothing wrong with the surgery, I think it is necessary and good to do so.
But all of this is stuff we've gone over. I want to come at this from a different angle in light of an article that I just read on Baseball Prospectus. This whole conversation we've been having is for naught in regards to anabolic steroids. Baseball has essentially already put this issue behind it. The more interesting question is what is next and what barriers exist or should exist in regards to them. Will Carrol of BP interviews a man he refers to as X2, who makes a number of the arguments you've been making. And this guy has "what's next". The money shot:
X2 smiled.
"Well, home runs are down, but I don't think that drug use is down. People point to positives being down, but that's because the ante has been upped. Players can't just use whatever they want any more. It was the Wild West just a few years ago, but guys are just being smarter about it now."
I nodded. "I'd agree. All the statistical studies showed there wasn't a big effect, but that's neither here nor there. So what are the smarter guys doing now? What's the next THG?"
"Probably SARMs, which aren't even on the legitimate market yet, but you can find on the black market. They're a nightmare for testing officials."
I'd heard a bit about SARMs (Selective Androgen Receptor Modulators). The word on the street was that they had a powerful anabolic effect, but that it came from a completely different mechanism. "What do they do? I mean, how do they work and how effective are they?"
"Chemically, they bind to the androgen receptor, just like testosterone, and signal the body to build more muscle and strength. It's like testosterone without the testosterone. Actually, the testosterone analogy is apt, because they're every bit as effective as [testosterone]."
Then there is this exchange which I found funny in light of our discussion.
"Firsthand?" I asked.
In answer, he set a small bottle on the table. It was your basic tinted glass bottle, a dark blue with a medicine dropper top. It sat on the table with the salt and pepper, next to my iced tea. "You've used it?"
He nodded, as if I'd asked a stupid question. "Yes. On an ethical level, I wouldn't be telling athletes to use it if I hadn't already."
"That's both some big confidence and, for many people, strange ethics."
Kyle you need to read this article because you're going to love it. What I will say is my argument revolved around the idea that there were negative long-term side effects to steroid use. I think that we like sports because we like seeing what the human body is capable of. I think though that it is inevitable, if not desirable, that we are going to enjoy sports because of what the human body, when combined with science, is capable of. If we can supplement the human body in such ways that it increases your quality of life without side-effects, I can't make a convincing argument against their use (i'm not 100 percent sure I mean this but I definitly need to think about it further). This is why this is not an all-or-nothing arguement, and as I re-read your earlier posts and cut through some of your grander over-statements, I realized they had forced me into corners of my own.
I still don't think I would give an athlete credit for using because I do like sports in part for watching what the human body is capable of, but I would be hard pressed to say they should be banned.
You started by making an argument that steroids should be legal, and it morphed into an argument about the potential for inherent "goodness". You then qualified yourself down to baseline that I found reasonable, and in turn I find myself qualifying my statements so that we may not be that far apart. I'm definitely interested in your thoughts on this article.
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