For a big league ballplayer, no temptation ever presented itself with more irresistibility over the last two decades than whether or not to utilize the potent juice of steroids and human growth hormones.
A batter pumped up by these performance enhancers possessed sufficient additional power to transform an undrugged, warning-track fly out into a “going, going, gone” home run, while a pitcher empowered with some steroidal gas in his tank could add at least five miles an hour to his fastball.
The extra pop in the bat and zip on the ball elevated minor leaguers to the majors, transformed average players into stars, and shifted All-Star regulars into record-shattering legends.
With mega-dollar differences associated with such pronounced improvements in performance, and no real drug testing administered by league or team officials (who collectively invoked a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy toward players’ drug use), why not juice up, become a markedly better ballplayer, and make substantially more money for the support of one’s family?
Different players answered this morally-charged question differently over baseball’s last 20 years.
How each reached his conclusion and the results arising from the player’s decision are fully explored in the Dallas Theatre Center’s electrifying production of Back Back Back, which will run through April 5.The play has a three-man cast of super young actors given pseudonym character names for one-time Oakland A’s teammates Mark McGwire, Jose Canseco, and Walt Weiss, who were back-to-back-to-back American League rookies of the year from 1986 to 1988.
McGwire and Canseco, the so-called “Bash Brothers,” lifted weights for all to see in the clubhouse as a means of disguising how they ratcheted up their power strokes, allowing them to become elite sluggers whose production for several years made them millions of dollars while seemingly putting them onto the fast track for Hall of Fame immortality in Cooperstown.
But then Canseco’s recurring injuries, resulting at least in part from his drug use, wound down his career before he could reach the magic number of 500 career home runs.
At about the same time, McGwire elevated himself into baseball history’s highest realm by shattering the single season homer record, hitting 70, an unbelievable nine more round-trippers than Roger Maris’ record which had stood for 37 years.
As the Bash Brothers grew in stature and accompanying power-number stats, Walt Weiss resisted the temptation to juice his body, and performed as a steady singles hitter and solid shortstop.
Weiss refused to grow his muscles (and therefore his paycheck) and had only a steady but unspectacular career.
Back Back Back allows playwright Itamar Moses to put words into these three ballplayers’ mouths that surely were never said, though with any level of sensibility, they should have been said.
The history associated with the three characters’ lives, beginning with their careers’ early years all the way through the Congressional hearings on steroid use in baseball, is presented accurately, and the tension in their chemistry and within their souls spellbinds the audience, regardless of whether or not the theater attendee cares one whit about baseball.
The oldest joke in the world about our national pastime is, “Question: Why do intellectuals like baseball so much?
Answer: It moves so slowly they can understand it.”
The DTC’s production of Back Back Back moves at just the right pace to humanize all perspectives on baseball’s steroid era, and puts into play the reality that the decision to juice or not to juice was anything but a simple one.
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