McGwire's Steroid Use, Ctd

A reader writes:

Though I'm of the opinion that the only "steroid problem" is that steroids aren't good enough yet, I think I might be able to provide some insight on why the use of performance-enhancing drugs is excoriated in baseball and ignored in football. Statistics in baseball, as noted historian Bill James has said, have acquired the power of language.

Mention a statistic to a baseball fan (even stripped of all other context or presented as a simple number) and he or she will likely be able to connect it with an actual person or event. "60" and "714" are Babe Ruth. ".406" is Ted Williams. I work in the industry, so my experience may not be common to that of the typical fan, but if you gave me a baseball player's full statistical record completely stripped of any identifying details, I'd have a better than even chance of telling you when he played, what position he played, where he hit in the batting order -- even more specific information like what he looked like or where he was from. In certain cases, I might even be able to simply give you his name just by looking at his stats.

To many fans or sportswriters, steroids disrupt the order of these statistics. They allow players to extend their careers, put up better numbers (steroids will not help you make contact with a curveball, but you will certainly hit it farther), and potentially break records that were previously held as sacrosanct. Baseball trades on its history -- the idea that the game played today is no fundamentally different than the way it was played ten, twenty, or even a hundred years ago. That's never been entirely true, but with steroid use, it's rather obviously false.

Football has no such attachment to numbers (save for Wins and Losses). Unless a football record has just been broken or is on the verge of being broken, it has no place in a fan's consciousness. If a player who is using steroids breaks the all-time record for, say, sacks in a season, it doesn't carry the same emotional resonance as would a similar record being broken in baseball -- because no one is able to recall the sack record number off the top of his head, or even who holds said record (I just looked it up: Michael Strahan, with 22.5).