For those of you lucky enough to know me or foolish enough to read my column regularly, you know I have a deep love of baseball. In my day, ballplayers were noble heroes who played for the love and the glory of the game, forgoing personal accolades and material gain for the sake of the team. Players would never cheat and the league’s leadership would ensure everyone was on a level playing field.
I was 10 years old when the Twins won their second World Series. I idolized Kirby Puckett. I was a touch young when the Twins won their first title 1987, but a little later in life a friend would joke that Twins’ championship teams were built like a beer-league softball team.
There are a number of ways baseball drew me in and inspired me to work in the industry. The game has a fascinating history. From the tradition on the field to racial integration and labor disputes, there is no shortage of drama on and off the field.
Nearly every spring I celebrate the start of a new season by reading a baseball book. This year I read Game of Shadows by Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams. The book chronicles the rise of the Bay Area Laboratory Cooperative (BALCO) and anabolic steroids among Major League Baseball and Olympic athletes.
It’s a fascinating tale of how the fledgling nutritional supplement industry opened doors for undetectable steroids for the elite athletes of the world. BALCO founder Victor Conte is a central figure in the book. The man comes across like a snake oil salesman plucked right out of the frontier era. An unstoppable hype machine, he built a roster of track clients, helping several sprinters shatter world records while beating drug tests.
Baseball has a long history of cheating. After building relationships with bodybuilders and strength trainer Greg Anderson, Conte was able to worm his way into the San Francisco Giants clubhouse. He transformed a 35-year-old Bonds from one of the best players in baseball to the most productive slugging machine the sport has ever seen.
The book does an interesting job weaving all the storylines together. Ultimately, it sets its crosshairs on Barry Bonds. It details his complicated relationship and eventual estrangement from a girlfriend, a relationship that overlapped with multiple marriages. It lays out the bizarre world of the Giants clubhouse where Bonds had his own wing with several lackeys. It also points out that when he passed Hank Aaron to become baseball’s home run king, none of his teammates came out of the dugout to greet him:
Another fascinating aspect of the book was baseball’s ambivalence to the steroid problem. Lots of players were juicing and the league didn’t care. When Mark McGwuire and Sammy Sosa were chasing Roger Maris’ home record in 1998, MLB could have cared less what was fueling the power surge. After a recent work stoppage, the league was thrilled with how the home run chase captured the nation’s attention.
When Bonds turned to undetectable steroids in the early 2000s, baseball didn’t even have a testing policy. The book helped bring national attention to the steroid issue and pressured baseball into action. Commissioner Bud Selig enlisted former Senator George Mitchell to investigate the issue. After 20 months, The Mitchell Report named 89 players who were alleged to use anabolic steroids or performance-enhancing drugs.Meanwhile, MLB and the Players’ Union finally agreed on a testing program. There were no penalties for testing positive. USA Today has an extensive timeline of MLB’s drug testing policy.
The most unexpected bombshell came at in the Afterword of the paperback release of the book. No baseball players were punished for cheating, but part of the reporting for the book included leaked grand jury testimony. The authors were sentenced to 18 months in prison for refusing to reveal their sources. As they point out in the last line of the book, it’s a longer sentence than any of the steroid dealers got. The punishment for Bonds and other exposed cheaters of the era? They may miss out on being elected to the Hall of Fame.
What a country. What a pastime.
An Idyllic Look at Baseball
While baseball history of my formative years is tainted by the Steroid Era, the game itself remains beautiful. For those interested in a great baseball sim, I recently rediscovered a terrific option: Out of the Park Baseball. It gives you complete control over a franchise, from managing the action on the field to shaping your roster and uncovering new talent.
I first discovered the franchise in the early 2000s, before it had the MLB license. I played through several 162-game schedules with fictitious names and ballparks. I checked in on another entry years down the road after they acquired the MLB license. It was more fun to have the actual names of players and franchises, but the game didn’t grab me as much.
When I saw OOTP 21 was available on Game Pass for PC, I decided to jump back in. The team at Out of the Park Developments has crafted a masterpiece. I was able to guide the Twins back to the World Series in my first year. Throughout the season, I constantly tinkered with my pitching staff, basically rebuilding the bullpen through trades with teams looking to dump closers in the last year of their contract.
Finding quality starting pitching was more challenging, especially after I lost Jose Berrios for four months of the season. I was able to put together a serviceable starting five through minor league promotions and the trade market. The season was made more complicated by owner goals pushing me to resign Nelson Cruz, even though he’s the second most expensive player on the team, he’s 39 and was having a terrible year.
I felt like there was a great tension between balancing current performance with future financial obligations. The Twins had some financial flexibility and I worked to purge unfavorable contracts. Teams seemed willing to trade talented relievers in the last years of their contract, so I had a lockdown bullpen to compensate for only average starting pitching. I intend to use the financial flexibility created by those players leaving to either add a top-tier starting pitcher or to repeat the process the next year.
Starting with the Twins’ talented roster is interesting, if I was doing a full review I would also start with a worse team to see what that experience was like. There are also custom settings to set the game up in many different ways, including historical leagues.
Best of all, there are no steroids in Out of the Park Baseball. Whatever happens on the field is a result of the individual confrontations of a bunch of 1s and 0s.
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