Why the Steroid Era and the Subprime Mortgage Crisis are (Pretty Much) Exactly the Same Thing

In our new feature "From the SandJ Archives", we giddily throw the spotlight on the comedy inherent in reading old features about Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, et al which are hilarious now in that they scream out the question "How was it not obvious!" I mean, it's not like steroids snuck up on us. Lenny Dykstra showed up at training camp looking like "The Thing" in 1993. Brady Anderson hit fifty dingers in 1996. Most informed sports fans knew that steroids existed. But, for some reason, there we all were in the "feel-good" summer of 1998 cheering on Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa, two sideshow freaks bearing no physical resemblance to themselves five years prior as they proceeded to obliterate one of baseball's most hallowed records.

Hindsight, as we all know, is 20/20, but now that the United States Congress, eighty-six Mitchell Report players, and a then fifteen year-old country singer have been wrapped up in this circus, people need to begin coming to terms with how to account for an entire generation of our  national pastime that now needs to be explained to our grandchildren. And when I say "how to account", I of course mean "who to blame".

While sitting back and thinking about how to go about dividing up the blame-load for the steroid era, I was struck by the similarities of the various and sundry accounts of "how it came about" to that other great national autopsy currently underway; the subprime mortgage debacle. Stay with me here, because the parallels are actually remarkable:

Major League Baseball = The Lenders: The first place anyone usually starts with either issue; why make loans to people who probably can't repay you, and why not do something to stop a performance-enhancing drug issue which has become obvious to the point of embarrassment? The answer in both cases lies in a simple upside versus downside analysis. Banking and baseball are both businesses. Banks make money by lending and MLB makes money through television contracts (i.e. people being interested in seeing games). If you want to make money in a competitive environment, you do what you need to do. Certainly, businesses have the option of making a stand if the environment spins out of control. Banks could stop making loans that don't make sense at the risk of denting the bottom line, and MLB could have taken a hard-line with the players' union, risking another strike and severely damaging the economic prospects for all of its franchises. But why bother? In both cases the party in question had a ready-made scapegoat. Banks were able to package these loans and sell them to Wall Street, and MLB had a players' union that would not let them test for drugs. Don't look at us; we're just doing our job. Now go back to watching the game, McGwire's up.

Mainstream Sports Media = Wall Street (including the rating agencies): Let's face it; the entire scenario in either case doesn't stand up unless it's packaged, stamped with approval and sold to unsuspecting investors (or fans). These are the guys closest to the game. They know best, right? Who are we to question their judgment? With justification, these sectors in both cases have raised the most ire and, in turn, felt the most acute pain. Just as the investment banks were analyzing the deals, running the numbers and leaning on their rating agency pals to put lipstick on their pigs, the sports reporters were in the clubhouses and interacting with the players on a daily basis. The obvious question for both: How the fuck could you not have known what was going on? Was it greed, laziness or a desire to feed your public a bunch of horseshit? Take your pick.

Trainers, etc. = Mortgage Brokers: Listen, obtaining and possibly injecting performance-enhancing drugs into a professional athlete isn't all that different from securing a mortgage for people who quite obviously can't afford it in the long run. You're a middleman who would not be there if the current conditions didn't require someone like you, and you can trust that, if you weren't the one doing it, someone else sure as hell would. Both mortgage brokers and personal trainers are very easy to throw under the bus. It's no wonder that the entire brokerage profession is being treated in a similar fashion to the Brian McNamees and Greg Andersons of the world. They have a face. You can point to McNamee, Anderson or one of the clubhouse "delivery boys" in the same way that a couple facing foreclosure can point at their broker and say - "Without him, this wouldn't have happened. Who is kidding whom?

Players = Homebuyers: Generally speaking, as a human being, one of, if not the most important decisions you will make in your life is the purchase of a new home; as a professional athlete, you would assume that among the largest decisions faced would be one involving taking a physically transformative substance with the goal of elevating your level of play on the field. With that said, is it really conceivable that such a decision could be made with the casualness of picking up a gallon of milk? No hand wringing? No overwrought analysis? No devil's advocacy? As we have learned from both the subprime and steroid debacles, the answer is a definite "no".

Here's the thing though, with these groups, so stops the buck, but the circumstances surrounding the two groups' illogical actions, taken in context, seem almost justified. The similarities in the behavior of these two mobs; ballplayers and homebuyers, are striking. All it took in both cases was a little success. Dykstra, Brady Anderson and Jose Canseco begat McGwire, Sosa, Bonds and Clemens. Somewhere along the line there was a tipping point where the average player was made to feel like a sucker for not joining the party. The lack of discouragement from the league and the media was easily construed as blatant encouragement for what they were doing. Likewise for Joe Homebuyer, who sat on the sidelines while people who made less money and seemed less intelligent than he considered himself to be were buying properties they shouldn't be able to afford (in some cases two or three of them) and watching them skyrocket in value, taking cash out all the way. It wasn't a strict case of "everyone's doing it" in either case. There was an implicit feeling of "I'm an idiot if I don't go along." The longer the situation was allowed to last, the more likely both homebuyers and ballplayers were to throw up their hands and say "Why not? Everyone can't be wrong."

Well, now the party is over. Banks are foreclosing at a record-pace, Clemens, Bonds, and Sosa are out of baseball involuntarily (with the first two facing possible jail-time) and McGwire is just a freakish historical footnote. Let's keep things in perspective though, infinitely more heartbreaking than having to explain to your grandchildren why baseball statistics from "that period of time" don't really count, is a parent trying to tell their child that the bank is taking their house and that's why they're moving.

One of the worst parts of both stories lies in the very unfair fact that; just as the homebuyer who did the right thing and didn't get in over his or her head is still faced with the other facets of the economic domino effect touched off by the subprime crisis, there were certainly a lot of clean players over the past fifteen or so years that actually had good careers (or even years) that are now deeply discounted. Large scale issues like these get painted with a broad brush and little distinction is made between the innocent and the guilty.

Until the current economic crisis subsides, we will be dealing with aftershock after aftershock, and several more autopsies will need to be done, but if you're looking for a bright-side on the baseball front, maybe we can take some small consolation in this: Greg Maddux recently won his 350^th game, he did it clean, and he did it against juiced hitters for most of his career. How do I know he's clean? Ummm... because I've seen him. If that guy was juicing, than he was doing it wrong. He looks like my tenth-grade science teacher. Also, Ken Griffey Jr. will have hit his 600^th homer any day now. I can't vouch for Griffey as easily as I can for Maddux, but the consensus is that Griffey is clean. I buy it because Griffey was a guy that was supposed to have 50+ home run potential from the time he came up at eighteen years old. He did manage to top the fifty mark twice, but the numbers don't bear out any steroid pattern. Sure he's forty pounds heavier than he was fifteen years ago, but then again, so am I, and I haven't popped a hammy every year for the last decade and been told to lay off the workouts for a while. It's called aging. So if baseball can manage to discard two legends (Clemens and Bonds) and replace them with two immensely more likable ones (Maddux and Griffey). Maybe there's hope for the rest of us as well. (But don't count on it.)