Chris Davis and the Culture of Assumed Guilt

A familiar sight to baseball fans
over the past four months.

On Saturday afternoon in sunny San Francisco, Orioles slugger Chris Davis hit a baseball 466 feet. Let's just appreciate that for a minute. 466 feet. Damn.

And before the ball had returned from the upper stratosphere to land halfway up the center-field bleachers at AT&T Park, before Davis had stopped watching the thing sail through the cloudless August sky, my viewing partner muttered something under his breath, a word that has buzzed around Davis this season like a swarm of bees chasing an ice cream truck.

"Steroids."

For reasons that should be pretty clear to even the most casual baseball fan, the ever-looming specter of the Steroid Era (a term which means less and less every time Bud Selig hands out another 50-game suspension) has made it impossible for us to look upon a mid-career power surge without cringing. We run through career stats to see whose slugging percentage is up, whose OPS+ has gone through the roof. The bigger the forearms, the more our suspicion grows. And Chris Davis -- with his square jaw and fastball-devouring 33-ounce bat -- is just the culprit we've trained ourselves to look out for.

I say we because I've been thinking it too.

Davis told the Baltimore Sun the power boost is from a revised plate approach and a strict diet. The cynic in me says that everyone has an excuse, be it spinach or dental work, and the general consensus (if that's what we're calling Rick Reilly nowadays) seems to agree. We listened to Big Mac deny it, and Braun and A-Rod, and we've just about run out of goodwill to beam in the direction of sluggers who've let us down time and time again. Sorry, Chris.

But hold on just one second: did I just say excuse? Since when did we start requiring an excuse for
being good at what you do? For giving us exactly what we're looking for?

Call it ironic. Call it a feedback loop. But it's a part of the game now, and not just for the players.

Davis said it himself: the single-season home run record he's chasing is the one set by Roger Maris in 1961. It's as if we all collectively decided that the 1994 strike just stretched on out for the better part of the next decade. It all just never happened. I'm not here to campaign for Roger Clemens' Hall of Fame candidacy or try to humanize Barry Bonds, but I think that it's dangerous to make the jump from punishing proven PED users to vilifying anyone who hits 40 home runs, and that the most dangerous thing about that jump is that it seems perfectly reasonable given the trajectory of the game over the past 20 years.

Call me crazy, but it seems like the only thing worse than a game where everybody is cheating is a game where everybody is suspected of cheating. The 'S' word has become a defense mechanism for fans to engage when we feel the familiar inkling that what we're experiencing is too good to be true, but the flipside of that is that it's also become a blanket rejection of anybody who accomplishes anything unexpectedly great.

In short, we've taught ourselves to hate the very heroes that we catch ourselves longing for.

And that's bad, but not because it's unfair to the players. It's bad because it's undermining our ability to experience baseball as we always have. Every time Chris Davis smacks a ball into the seats -- as he has done a majors-best 42 times this year through Sunday's games -- and our reaction is not one of joy (if you're an Orioles fan) or irritation (everybody else in the AL east) but of speculation as to whether or not Davis has taken drugs, we get farther and farther away from the game, sucked away into a storyline that ultimately goes nowhere. We have no way of knowing if Davis has taken PEDs, so we might as well believe him when he says he hasn't.

That doesn't mean that league official can't or shouldn't take steps to keep PEDs out of the game. The MLB's substance-abuse policy can be tightened. The testing mechanism can be improved. Needless to say, it will all be a lot easier if the Player's Association makes more than a perfunctory effort to make these changes happen. My point is simply that these sidebars should not distract us from the actual game that, believe it or not, still takes place out on the field, far from the speculative minds that haunt the sports-talk airwaves and blogosphere.

If Rick Reilly and others are eventually proven right and Chris Davis is somehow tied to PEDs, then fine. Be as merciless as your instincts tell you you should be. Until then, how about some admiration? The guy can flat-out hit.

Photograph courtesy of ESPN