MAILBAG:

Spring training has arrived, and our hearts and minds return to the diamond, the nostalgic smell of the fresh-cut green grass of baseball and the never-ending steroid story stuffed with controversy.

Joe Bell’s excellent column (“MLB needs a Judge Landis,” March 6) hits a four bagger.

Bell notes, “In my view, the growing cadre of cheaters using steroids marks the first time since the Black Sox scandal that the probity of the game itself has been so seriously challenged ... While Judge Landis spins in his grave, the people who should be sweating are the team owners, the players union, and former owner and current baseball commissioner Bud Selig ... ”

This is to expand on Bell’s column and further suggest why steroids and baseball don’t mix — and why we as a society should also be sweating and sharing some of the blame.

The playing field is an artificial universe, bounded by strict rules and procedures. There is no assumption that the contending teams have equal abilities or resources. There is an assumption that their competitive clash will produce a result hard to define — that of excellence.

In the past, this excellence has gained its practitioners everything from the favor of gods to that of cheerleaders, and wealth has often been part of that excellence. But the purpose of the contest remains within itself and in the hearts and minds of the players and observers.

Sports ideally should be a competition based on pure athletic meritocracy and eventually decided by inequalities. But the field must be kept level.

All of which brings us to steroids and why they’re bad for athletics at any level.

Steroid use makes competition uneven and has dangerous consequences for the athletes. By taking steroids, some athletes force others to do so to compete.

At the highest levels, the difference between making the team and going home is often astonishingly small. Steroids provide an artificial edge, but one that exacts a terrible price off the field and later in life, inevitably affecting others.

Consider that of the 86 baseball players named by the Mitchell Report, only seven were all-stars. Most of them would have made it big without taking steroids. But for the other 79 players, steroid use might have made the difference between making the “Show” or staying in the Minor Leagues.

And there is a fundamental difference between accepting the risk of injury, even death, as part of the game, and taking drugs that will inevitably destroy long after the game is over.

Then there’s the economic argument. The rewards of professional athletic success are now so unrealistically large that an athlete can “rationally” choose them over long life, a choice popular among the young and strong who’ve yet to conceive of their own mortality.

It has long been apparent that this avarice has suborned the purity of athletics: greedy athletes and their agents, employers and the corporations who pay them obscenely to shill (i.e. to endorse their products).

In different contexts, Achilles, Faust and others made similar choices. But how many of us, I wonder, would consciously make such decisions in our own lives: wealth and fame in exchange for a truncated mortality.

Is it heroic? Does it matter what you do to succeed?

Currently, civilization seems to say yes.

There’s the rub, and that’s where we all share a portion of the blame.

MICHAEL GLUECK