John – Congratulations on the birth of your daughter.

When she is watching baseball in 2039 and Derek Sanderson Jeter II, (the 28 year old Yankee Phenom, and 2038 AL MVP) is having a press conference to deal with the fallout of a new Sports Illustrated Story due out in April that alleges that Derek the Second is not the son of Derek the first, but a genetically engineered clone, and the baseball world is up in arms over the scandal, the damage to the game, and the assault on the record books, remind her of the absolute hypocrisy of everyone involved, and that the same story has been told, in many different forms for at least the last 70 years.

Below is a snippet from a Sports Illustrated article in 1969!

There are abundant rumors—the wildest of which circulate within rather than outside the sporting world—about strung-out quarterbacks, hopped-up pitchers, slowed-down middleweights, convulsed half-milers and doped-to-death wrestlers. Nevertheless, it is the question of motive and morality that constitutes the crux of the athletic drug problem. Even if none of the gossip could be reduced to provable fact, there remains ample evidence that drug use constitutes a significant dilemma, not so much for individual athletes as for sport in general. One reason is that the use of drugs in sport leads one directly to more serious and complicated questions. Is athletic integrity (and, conversely, corruption) a matter of public interest? Does it matter, as appreciators of sport have so long and piously claimed it does, that games be played in an atmosphere of virtue; even righteousness? If not, what is the social utility of games—why play them at all? Drug usage, even more than speculation about bribery, college recruiting, spit-balls or TV commercials, raises such sticky questions about the fundamentals of sport that one can understand the instinctive reaction of the athletic Establishments: when it comes to drugs, they ignore, dismiss, deny.

“Somebody should speak out on this subject, and speak out strongly,” says Dr. Robert Kerlan, until recently the physician for the Los Angeles Dodgers as well as for a number of individual athletes in all sports. “I’m not a therapeutic nihilist,” says Kerlan “Situations arise where there are valid medical reasons for prescribing drugs for athletes. There are special occupational health problems in some sports. However, the excessive and secretive use of drugs is likely to become a major athletic scandal, one that will shake public confidence in many sports just as the gambling scandal tarnished the reputation of basketball. The essence of sports is matching the natural ability of men. When you start using drugs, money or anything else surreptitiously to gain an unnatural advantage, you have corrupted the purpose of sports as well as the individuals involved in the practice.”

(emphasis added).

Double hat tip to Rob Neyer who linked to this blog by Only Baseball Matters which gives the writers of today an nice history lesson about Performance Enhancing Drugs.