McGwire! Merriman! Morals!

I think it's interesting that you bring up the spitball and the bigger-faster-stronger issues in baseball and football in relation to moralistic arguments.

First, a big part of the reason doctoring the ball became illegal was because Ray Chapman got hit in the head by a Carl Mays pitch after Mays covered the ball in dirt, spit, and tobacco juice, turning the ball a color that was very difficult to distinguish to see when it was coming at his head at 85+ miles per hour. (This wasn't unique to Mays, of course. He was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. Although Chapman was definitely in the wronger place.) There's surely some truth in Ty Cobb's statement that the owners wanted more home runs, too, of course, but there was, at the time, a legit morals-based reason for the banning of the spitball.

I will also add that spitballers, scuffers, etc. get a pass from people compared to juicers. Whitey Ford was apparently a huge doctorer of baseballs, but nobody wants to kick him out of the Hall of Fame. Brian Moehler earned the loving nickname "Scuffy" from the Baseball Prospectus crew after he was caught with sandpaper in his glove. Now, Moehler's not a guy anyone's going to be having Hall of Fame arguments about, but after his suspension was over, he just went right back to mediocre pitching. He moved on with his life in a way that Barry Bonds or Mark McGwire will never be able to do.

Second, steroids in football can have the same moral component now that everyone has read Malcolm Gladwell's piece about head injuries in football. The bigger, faster, and stronger players are, the more force they're putting into hits, and the worse the players are all going to end up. And yet it's not clear anyone cares.

I think that's probably the part about morals arguments that bother me the most. It's not so much that we make them at all in a realm where they just don't apply, it's that we make them in such blatantly inconsistent ways. Mark McGwire played 250 more games than he would have without steroids. Shawne Merriman used steroids to get stronger and faster so he could earn the nickname "Lights Out" for causing serious head trauma to opposing players. Exactly one of these players has earned the public's everlasting enmity.