Why?
Why do we care about baseball players and steroids? Okay, so I don't. But why do other people?
posted by perrykat at
11:34 PM
Thursday, February 14, 2008
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2 Comments:
I've wondered the same before. The answer seems to be, for the kids.
That is, if everyone in professional sports uses drugs, then every college kid and high school kid on down will feel like if they want to compete, they have to use drugs, too.
The other part is that for those who love sports, and who look at (say) Babe Ruth's home run record, if it turns out that those old records they (the fans) remember and cherish are being broken by those who are basically cheaters, the fans get angry and call their representatives.
Now, you can say, if a sport gets taken over by cheaters and fans don't like it, they should just stop being fans (buying tickets, watching games), and that would put pressure on the owners and players to clean up.
One problem is, for an individual player the incentives are still counterproductive. A player can say "I won't take drugs, and will fall behind, for the greater good of the game and the greater average salary of the players remaining" ... but that's unlikely. And it's been the players' unions who have fought the drug testing.
Really, though, I think sports fans see drugs ruining the games, and sports fans have votes, and politicians want to appeal to voters, and politicians have the (somewhat legitimate) excuse of "the kids will do it if we don't stop this", so the pols grandstand. (Knowing perhaps that, if there were other politicians we could haul these politicians in front of for their own corruption, we would.)
Oh and we are the children of Zeus and Prometheus and Oedipus, and like to watch our gods fall.
We are a interesting group, aren't we?
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