In Praise Of The Unjuiced

Enough Innuendo. Let's name names. It's time to embrace McCarthyism—Charlie McCarthyism—and expose those in baseball who are so unmuscled, so fungo-bat skinny, so ventriloquist's-dummy diminutive that they couldn't possibly be on steroids. Because baseball, on Opening Day, doesn't need a blacklist. It needs a whitelist.

The Phillie Phanatic is steroid-free. His head not only has never increased in size (such enlargement being a telltale sign of abuse), it disappeared entirely in the off-season. While the stolen head was returned a week later—not on a platter to Herod's wife, but in a black sports bag to a radio station—he remains at a competitive disadvantage to Mr. Met, whose official team bio brazenly acknowledges, "His baseball head began to grow in '69 and grew still larger from '73 to '86."

That same bio concludes, even more damningly, " Mr. Met's head is the only earthbound orb with its own gravitational pull," an assertion that overlooks former pitcher Tom (Buffalo Head) Niedenfuer, whose noggin, projected on the Diamond Vision at Dodger Stadium, was actual size. Still, we can't help but wonder what Mr. Met's surname is short for: Metanabol? Metandiabol? Metandren? Methyltestosterone? Methandrostenolonum?

But this is a whitelist, not a blacklist. Devil Rays coach Don Zimmer, the Preparation H pitchman, has been on 'rrhoids, but never on 'roids. His home park—Tropicana Field—is juiced, in an effort to keep up with Minute Maid Park in Houston. But then, even the ivy at Wrigley is rumored to be on Miracle-Gro.

Again, though—we've come to praise the comically biceped ( Kent Tekulve), not to bury the chemically biceped ( Ken Caminiti). Now that a shadow of suspicion falls on everyone who ever played the game, we should exonerate Kyle (Skinny) Graham, Gene (Stick) Michael and Starvin' Marvin Freeman, none of whom ever ingested Ovaltine, much less creatine, to judge by their physiques.

Anthony Perkins in Fear Strikes Out—scarecrow-skinny in his Red Sox flannels—requires no retroactive urinalysis. If Wee Willie Keeler were playing today, would we make Willie Keeler wee? Certainly not: He was 5'4" and weighed a buck forty.

A young Paul (Big Poison) Waner, at 153 pounds, could literally have been blown away by a fastball. Unless it were thrown by Bobby Shantz, who won 24 games in 1952 at 142 pounds and slept on a resin bag on overnight train trips.

The point is, not all baseball records are tainted, and there remain manifold modern-era players who are—blatantly, nakedly—nor using. If Randy Johnson were any thinner, he'd be a Randy Johnson poster. Tony Gwynn was on KFC, not THG. John Kruk never took steroids—or, alas, Altoids.

And yet, to read the papers over an endless winter of steroid allegations, you would think it impossible to find a clean ballplayer. You're searching for hay in a needlestack. Which is why, now more than ever, we need optimism. For one day—Opening Day-let's look at the game through rose-colored glasses. (But not, please, through Rose-colored glasses, which turn every landscape into the Santa Anita backstretch.)

What do we see? Pitchers like the Pirates' Oliver Perez—6'3" and 160 pounds—who have the arms and legs of marionettes. Infielders like the Angels' David Eckstein, who looks, in his uniform, like a number-22 pencil. Even sluggers like Ken Griffey Jr., whose 481 home runs are a feat more athletic than synthetic.