Drug War Moralism Hits Rock Bottom

Although the general assumption that today’s PEDs are the biggest threat to the Integritude of the Game Ever, much much worse than the ones Mickey Mantle used is to be expected at this point, Nicholas Dawidoff’s review of Selena Roberts’s A-Rod is pretty embarrassing for a couple reasons. I can’t take issue with Dawidoff’s unusually positive evaluation of the book per se — like Neyer, I’d only read it if someone paid me or made me, and I’m not sure about the former. (Maybe there are still people fascinated by the fact that some ballplayers of the 2000s used PEDs and shocked by the fact that professional athletes will sometimes have sexual relations with people other than their spouses. I sure hope I don’t get stuck talking to them at a dinner party.)

But a review should, at least, deal with the serious questions of reliability raised about a lot of Roberts’ implications. Perhaps Dawidoff has reasons for finding these allegations more credible than most reviewers have. But he just doesn’t address it; rather, he blandly treats speculations from single anonymous sources contradicted by on-the-record sources as the equivalent of stuff that Roberts has actually proven. (The fact that Roberts was a Times reporter and columnist makes this even more problematic, although at least it’s disclosed.) I’m prepared to believe anything about Slappy, but surely the reliability of evidence behind allegations is the kind of thing a review in the Paper of Record should deal with.

But that’s not the worst of it. Some drug war moralists I can at least rationally engage with. But wow:

Steroids have been the most serious blight in the history of the game because — unlike the gambling and cocaine scandals of the past — for more than a decade these drugs, acquired overseas in poor countries or from desperate AIDS patients (as Ms. Roberts and others have documented), fundamentally destroyed the integrity of competition.

Let me get this straight — literally throwing World Series games didn’t affect the “integrity of competition” the way that using PEDs anybody could have used did? Evidently, drug war moralism involves a lot of dumb and ahistorical arguments, but I don’t think this can ever be topped. Dawidoff isn’t a dumb guy — his Moe Berg book was actually good — so I guess this is just an example of drug war hysteria making people go off the rails. But wow.