No Mental Muscle on This Issue

The Dodgers play the Angels tonight at Edison Field. Both teams are fighting for playoff position and division titles. This should be a time to get excited about baseball. But should we feel guilty about getting excited?

It is clear that some baseball players are using steroids. Maybe more than some. But nothing is going to be done about steroid use and the mockery it may be making of ageless records and the achievements of long-gone heroes. No one has any incentive to do anything.

There is a channel-surfing stopper of a television commercial that makes this so clear.

Major League Baseball is promoting its Milwaukee All-Star game and its summer Home Run Derby by featuring top players as humongous, comically over-muscled caricatures.

Pedro Martinez, the thin Red Sox pitcher, has a chest the size of a house in this ad. The bulging muscles in Barry Bonds’ arms tear through his shirt.

Just the image you’d want when there are so many questions about Bonds, who turns 38 next month, and how he is breaking records he couldn’t dream about 12 years ago.

Sammy Sosa seems barely able to stand upright, so overly large are his chest and forearms. The commercialized Jason Giambi could flatten all of Southern California if he were to topple over, something likely to happen so top-heavy is the character.

This is what Major League Baseball officials see as the best way to turn fans on to the graceful game of summer--by making its big names appear to be on massive doses of steroids. Baseball is being marketed as professional wrestling.

And why not?

Don’t fans buy into this image?

Ballparks are filled with fans there to see if Bonds can swat another homer into the bay. How many think about how it can be that a 38-year-old man is bigger, stronger, quicker than when he was 26. Until now, nature allowed a 26-year-old athlete to be physically more impressive than a 38-year-old athlete. The 38-year-old, though, had the advantage of wisdom, experience, of knowing the shortcuts and the tricks. Now we have a 38-year-old with all that wisdom and experience and a body better conditioned than when he was 26.

Fans want the pop. Fans want Sosa and Bonds hitting rockets. Fans won’t be so quick to pay for the privilege of watching the home run champion hit 40 while threatening no records. The Mark McGwire-Sosa battle showed that. We don’t get excited for a home run race. We need a record-breaking home run race.

The owners want to fill their ballparks. The way to fill the ballparks, apparently, is to promote players as bulked-up Hulk Hogan-esque characters of mythical strength and superhuman powers.

While the baseball fan is playing a new game--cruising through his favorite team’s roster and trying to guess which player is on steroids (the one who gained 20 pounds of muscle in the off-season, the one who is hitting dozens more homers at 38 than 28, the one with the chiseled body and the annual month or so on the injured list?)--owners sell their game by using comic book characters. Real people aren’t good enough.

And the players, they want to hit 80 home runs, bat .390, strike out hundreds of batters. Because that’s what gets you paid. That’s what gets you on “SportsCenter,” the 450-foot blast, the 99-mph fastball, the newest, amazing-for-a-minute record. That’s what causes the fans to buy your shirts and call your name, helps you get endorsements and accolades and the life so many professional athletes believe they deserve.

The players’ agents, they want their clients to hit the 80 home runs, bat .390, strike out hundreds of guys because the agent wants a cut of the biggest possible deal.

So the players, through their union and its chief, Donald Fehr, are comfortable in making the issue of testing players for the use of steroids nothing more than a bargaining chip in the ongoing labor negotiations.

They seem willing to trade away a chance to clean up their game and maybe save themselves a lifetime of health problems, or perhaps an early death, for a bigger collective bargaining agreement. There is no great force pushing for the elimination of steroids from the game.

Ken Caminiti and Jose Canseco may be considered nothing more than disgruntled, ungrateful ex-players trying to make a buck because they can’t cut it as athletes any more, but not many players or fans are arguing loudly that their allegations of steroid use in baseball are untrue.

Mostly what has been heard since the two spoke out about, in Caminiti’s case, his own use of the drug and in Canseco’s case, his assertion that 85% of major league players use the drug, is that that they are disloyal and have broken some sort of locker room code that says what happens in the clubhouse stays in the clubhouse.

It would be nice to have some players who are frustrated and angry seeing their game taken over in unnatural ways, players who will never use steroids, who truly care about their own health and future, stand up and demand drug testing now. It would be great to hear someone other than Curt Schilling speak up, maybe even to say that their sport needs accountability and that drug testing is not something to be used as a bargaining chip.

Players should not be content to have any part of their future health held in the hands of Fehr or baseball Commissioner Bud Selig.

But they are content, it seems. As are the fans. So we watch the cartoon characters on TV and watch the cartoon game on the field.

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Diane Pucin can be reached at diane.pucin@latimes.com.