The New York Times-20080127-Same Chemicals- Different Reactions

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Same Chemicals, Different Reactions

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While baseball fans fret over the continuing drug investigations, football lumbers toward the Super Bowl without incurring much angst over its assorted scandals.

Why is that? Why are people making preposterous proposals for asterisks on the records of bulked-up Blutos of the past generation while snickering tolerantly at transgressions in the N.F.L.?

For example, one of the teams in next Sunday's Super Bowl was penalized -- lightly, it says here -- for spying on the Jets early this season. And there is reason to believe this was not the first and only time the Patriots used illegal film surveillance.

Commissioner Roger Goodell levied fines of $500,000 to Coach Bill Belichick and another $250,000 to the Patriots and took away a future draft pick -- nothing, in other words, to stop a great team from proceeding to the Super Bowl.

In baseball, the Mitchell investigation is finally forcing the spotlight on management of the San Francisco Giants for allowing Barry Bonds's enabler inside the clubhouse, and top management of the Yankees and the Mets must ultimately address the reality that creeps like Brian McNamee and Kirk Radomski were no strangers to the inner sanctum.

Belichick must now be seen as a great coach with a mediocre conscience, but what about the Kraft family? As members of Congress told the baseball commissioner, Bud Selig, and Donald Fehr of the players union, this happened on their watch.

For that matter, the Patriots have rolled through the playoffs with the 35-year-old Rodney Harrison cavorting in the defensive backfield. Broadcasters make a big thing about his aged wisdom, but there is precious little mention that he did a four-game suspension early this season for receiving human growth hormone.

And in the conference championship game, the Patriots beat the Chargers, whose Shawne Merriman had done his own four games last season for being caught with a precursor to the steroid nandrolone in his system. He's going to the Pro Bowl.

I don't know Shawne Merriman. I don't know Rodney Harrison. But nothing was made of it, Mike Lowell, Boston's World Series star, told The Associated Press the other day, suggesting the two sports are held to different standards.

Selig often says the same thing, and he is not wrong. Why is that?

The broadest answer is that football has a great appeal because of the violence -- with John Madden chortling biff-bam-pow as 300-pound human projectiles crash into each other. Sane people stay indoors and marvel at the great spectacle from frozen Green Bay. We also make the assumption that players must need massive doses of painkillers, stimulants and bodybuilding chemicals to risk their necks to entertain us.

I don't suppose there is one football coach in America -- from junior high school up -- who can really afford to ask how his players grew so big so young. Don't ask, don't tell. Then there are the four former pro players who died young and were found to have had brain deterioration similar to that generally found only in boxers with dementia or people in their 80s. Next Sunday, I don't expect anybody will much care.

Another reason football gets off the hook is the anonymity of the scrum, with 22 varying players out there on every down. Star players like Julius Peppers and Dana Stubblefield, who occasionally get attention while tossing opponents out of the way like Hefty bags full of holiday detritus, have been traced to bodybuilding chemicals. But the game is largely a group effort.

Then, too, football does not have statistics of baseball -- Barry Bonds's 762 career home runs or Roger Clemens's 354 career victories, two totals that cannot possibly be neutered with asterisks, no matter what comes out. Football? The other day, I had lunch with some fellow baseball writers riding out these last weeks of hibernation, and we earnestly could not name a single football record.

Most players in the N.F.L. are solid citizens. Football should not be judged for bad boys like Tank Johnson, Pacman Jones and Chris Henry, who have been suspended for truculent and illegal behavior. Randy Moss, the Patriot with a past, was recently accused by a Florida woman of battery causing serious injury. Then there is Michael Vick, the dog-torturing quarterback, currently incarcerated.

I don't like it, Goodell said last year. I think it's a bad reflection on the N.F.L. It's not what the N.F.L. represents. I don't believe it represents our players. It's a very few number of players. They are tainting the league and tainting the other players.

Other sports have scandals -- cycling, track and field, soccer. Apparently, the American public is fascinated by the desperation born of short and dangerous football careers, with players banished for one missed block or one bad snap. Football is a compelling weekly event, but I submit that baseball still has a deeper hold on the national psyche.

We save more of our moral concerns for what Bonds and Clemens just might have done. Baseball could consider this a compliment.

[Illustration]PHOTOS: Rodney Harrison, left, and Shawne Merriman had only four-game suspensions for using performance-enhancing drugs. (PHOTOGRAPHS BY, LEFT, MATT CAMPBELL/EUROPEAN PRESSPHOTO AGENCY; TOM STRATTMAN/ASSOCIATED PRESS)