Perfect Timing

Wednesday afternoon, left fielder Melky Cabrera, of the San Francisco Giants, was suspended for fifty games after a drug test showed artificially elevated levels of testosterone, a violation of Major League Baseball’s policy on performance-enhancing drugs. He cheated, and his M.V.P.-caliber season is now essentially over.

A few hours later, pitcher Felix Hernandez, of the Seattle Mariners, completed the twenty-third perfect game in Major League history—the third one this season alone, and the second at Seattle’s Safeco Field this year.

In June, I wrote about Matt Cain’s perfect game and noted that this era of remarkable pitching feats is the result of a few factors—better testing for performance-enhancing drugs, which has discouraged hitters from cheating; better coaching and conditioning for pitchers; and just plain old luck.

That Hernandez’s gem came on the same day as Cabrera’s fall is a reminder of how critical the cleansing of baseball’s lineups has been. Wednesday’s suspension brings back bitter memories of the “steroid era” of the nineties and early aughts, when some hitters, unnaturally boosted by a variety of performance-enhancing drugs, were producing at an unprecedented level, laying waste to the game’s pitchers. A more aggressive drug policy was instituted in 2006, and since then, offensive production is down across the board, to the advantage of pitchers. (Some pitchers have confessed to using performance-enhancing drugs during the same era—and others have been implicated—but the numbers suggest that “juicing” offered greater benefits to hitters.) Hernandez, one of the game’s best hurlers, is good enough that he could’ve thrown a perfect game even in the worst of baseball’s drug-plagued years, but it certainly helps to be playing during the post-2006 “Age of the Pitcher.”

Cabrera used to play for the New York Yankees, my team, from 2005 to 2009. He was profoundly average, even during his best season, 2009, when he had a .274 batting average and hit thirteen home runs. He had a knack for clutch hits, which was exciting for fans, but I wasn’t sorry when he was traded away to the Atlanta Braves after that season. Following a miserable 2010—when he was, by some metrics, the worst hitter in baseball—in 2011, while playing for the Kansas City Royals, he suddenly surged to a .305 average, with eighteen home runs. He was then traded to the Giants, and this season he’d been one of the top hitters in the game, sporting a .346 batting average, the second best in the majors, and winning the All-Star Game’s M.V.P. award. In hindsight, particularly when looking at his 2010 nadir, we should’ve known that his rapid career turnaround was too good to be true. Is it possible that the testosterone had nothing to do with it? Of course. But the contrary explanation seems more likely. We were fooled.

That’s the reality of being a baseball fan today—we’ve been spoiled by the success of the 2006 drug policy. We can see that the players are skinnier, and that fewer balls are flying out of the park. By all appearances, the system is working. Which is why when a player like Cabrera unexpectedly bursts onto the scene, we’re willing to chalk it up to sheer determination—many, including his former hitting coach on the Yankees, Kevin Long, said that he had simply rededicated himself to the game.

We saw the best, and the worst, of baseball on Wednesday. Hernandez’s triumph, the latest in an astonishing streak of pitching dominance, reminds us that baseball is cleaner than it has been in a long time. But Cabrera showed us that some players are still gaming the system, or, at the very least, trying to.

Photograph by Ted S. Warren/AP Photo.