Howard Bryant became a sports writer so that he could write a book about racism and Boston sports, specifically as it pertained to the Red Sox. “Shut Out” featured fine reporting but the writing was surprisingly repetitive and weak in spots. However, it remains an extremely useful book in spite of its flaws because the subject is so rich. I always felt as if Bryant did not have a strong editor to help make his narrative shine. That is not the case with Bryant’s second effort, “Juicing the Game,” a story that is much larger in scope but one that is also told with great precision and focus. Bryant’s reporting continues to be top-notch (and this book certainly could not have been written if Bryant was not established inside the game), but it is his writing that has grown by leaps and bounds. If “Juicing the Game” is not a truly great book–and it might just be–it certainly is an exceedingly good one. It is the story of the Bud Selig Era and will go down as the logical successor and ideal companion to John Helyar’s “Lords of the Realm.”
I wasn’t exactly sure what the book was about when I first heard about it. I assumed it was an expose about steroids, a subject that doesn’t exactly captivate me. But “Juicing the Game” is really an insider’s history of the professional game since Fay Vincent was commissioner. It features a huge cast of characters and explores how and why the current Offensive Age, the Steroids Era came to be. Perhaps the most compelling aspect of the book is that Bryant does not attempt to simplify a complicated situation. The bottom line may not be complex (mo money, mo problems), but Bryant doesn’t lay the blame on one thing in particular-—instead, the entire game is complicit:
To Glenn Stout, the crumbling of the 1998 monument resembled nothing less than a classic morality tale. It wasn’t just the players, and it wasn’t just drug use, Stout thought, but the entire baseball institution that was under indictment. Baseball needed to recover from the strike, and found itself seduced by a culture of uncontrolled accumulation. Every segment of the game was culpable. It was the players who used whatever substances were available to maximize their achievements, and in turn their earnings, at the expense of their credibility. It was the fans who did not care that the game was being made less legitimate as long as they were treated to a more exciting product. It was the press and the broadcast media that chose to reap the added profits and increased exposure that came during the boom time instead of employing the stamina and scrutiny required to confront a spiraling baseball culture. Finally, Stout thought, it was the owners that profited from drug use and ran from the responsibility until there was nowhere else to go.
And this:
Tony Gwynn did not believe baseball was in crisis, but thought the decade of offense had to some degree been engineered by design. The strike had forced the game’s hand, Gwynn believed. Piece by piece, from the gradual institution of a tighter strike zone, to the manipulation of the baseball, to the construction of home run-friendly parks, and ultimately to allowing player’s growth in size to go unchecked and largely unquestioned, baseball had manipulated its product toward greater offensive production. It was a stunning consideration.
“Take into account us trying to regain and recapture the American public’s imagination and the hitter’s realizing that if he got bigger and stronger he could hit the ball out the other way,” Tony Gwynn said. “And it all manifested itself into a product people liked. And now it’s too late to go back. It’s too late and you can’t go back.”
