The Show Goes On

Ryan Howard is headed where only Barry, Big Mac and Sammy have gone before. Got a problem with that?

"Everyone ready for The Freak Show?" Phillies outfielder Jeff Conine announces in the visitors' clubhouse before game time, sounding like a gather-around carnival barker summoning ladies and gentlemen and kids of all ages.

The Freak Show, 6'4" and 250-plus pounds of lumberjack-thick menace, is getting dressed in a corner, buttoning up with the giant, calloused paws of someone who works with his man-hands for a living. Ryan Howard is bigger than everyone around him in this room, with the kind of outsize strength your dad had when you were little. In the next few hours at Dolphin Stadium, he'll single, double and walk four times, and that will somehow classify as a disappointment, because those fans who showed up to witness the amazing feats of the circus strong man had to settle instead for a parade of pitchers acting like jugglers and clowns.

At the entrance of The Freak Show's clubhouse, someone has put up a flyer that reads, "Walk Bonds Every AB"—except "Bonds" is crossed out in marker and "Howard" is handwritten underneath it. Later, the Marlins, leading by one run in the ninth inning of a September game between wildcard contenders, will walk Howard intentionally to push the eventual tying run into scoring position, much as the Astros earlier in the week had walked Howard intentionally to lead off the ninth in a tie game. Fear The Freak, boys and girls. Better to give him one base for free than watch him take all four against your will. A humbled Howard will say afterward that he has never been so respected. He leaves unsaid that he has earned it.

Over in the other clubhouse two days ago, Marlins pitchers met with coaches and were told in no uncertain terms to not let The Freak Show beat them—no way, no Howard. So he hit merely one home run that night. He waited until the next night to hit two more, his baseball-leading 55th and 56th, to drive in every run in a 3-2 win. After one of those, a ridiculous, opposite-field shot, the men who bat behind Howard gathered in the on-deck circle and began giggling about the freakery.

"What are we witnessing here?" Pat Burrell asked. "The presence of greatness," Conine replied.

Conine has witnessed some things in 16 major league seasons. Mark McGwire hitting the ball approximately the length of two football fields. Barry Bonds hitting 73 home runs in one season. But what he had never seen before The Freak Show was someone who could wait so long to start his lefthanded swing, thus giving himself more time for pitch recognition, and then create so much power and speed in the shortened burst from shoulder to plate to send what would be popups or flyouts for weaker men over the oppositefield fence. Most hitters need to yank through the strike zone to pull a baseball beyond the field of play; The Freak Show needs only the first half of a late swing to generate the same strength.

"He hits the ball the other way like no one I've ever seen," Conine says. "I've never seen the trajectory of his opposite-field home runs. They're supposed to be line drives. You don't see popups that go out the other way 50 feet deep into the seats. You just don't."

And that inevitably raises another question in a cynical Sports Nation contaminated by skepticism because of Floyd Landis and Justin Gatlin and the 2003 Carolina Panthers and Howard's entire tainted sport: When you are asked to believe the unbelievable now, to discern between natural and supernatural, between things you are accustomed to seeing and things you just aren't, are you still willing to believe your eyes?

This isn't fair to Howard, of course. He is, by all accounts, a baby-faced assassin—friendly and kind and fundamentally decent. He is liked inside and outside the clubhouse, a polite pro who makes time for the little people and has reporters wondering nothing more controversial than whether big fame will ever change him. No, not him. That's what you hear. No way.

And maybe he is perfectly pure. It's just that, given the state and stakes of sports, especially this one, the player is in a no-win position. Hit more homers than you ever have, and you might be using. Hit fewer than you ever have, and you might not be using anymore . Howard could be the unharmed infant, still in the car seat, cooing and innocent on the side of the road. It's just that so much of what surrounds him is mangled metal and 19-car pileup. And, besides, what does likability have to do with anything in the cutthroat ecosystem of competition junkies, when the same maniacal will that makes athletes beautiful beckons them to the ugly side?

Sports aren't nice. The athlete's desire is a little bit insane and a lot unreasonable. It isn't a big jump from Curt Schilling enduring needles in the ankle before and during games throughout the summer of 2004—and four separate surgeries on the same ankle—to players using steroid creams and human growth hormone. Want a glimpse into lopsided rationality? Look inside Bill Romanowski's head, which has suffered 20-plus concussions by his cloudy count. Romanowski swallowed hundreds of pills a day when he was an NFL linebacker, ionized his own water, sent his fecal matter to a lab for study and took an IV of antioxidants while in his hyperbaric chamber (the one in his home, not the one with which he traveled). He admits to "short-term and long-term memory issues, attention issues, mood issues, taste and smell issues," but laughs and says the Sunday highs were worth it. "No regrets," he slurs.

That's what you're competing against in pro sports. And while making snap judgments about it is easier for the rest of us when it involves pro wrestling villains like Bonds and José Canseco, you can't ever know what lurks underneath all the packaging. In between public service announcements for abused children, the Popeyearmed McGwire embraced his son the bat boy in a heartwarming moment after breaking Roger Maris' 37-year-old, single-season record in 1998. Rafael Palmeiro seemed a pillar of professional integrity for two decades before wagging a finger at Congress. What about Jason Giambi, who secretly told the truth about his steroid use to the BALCO grand jury (it was leaked, of course)? He shriveled in both stats and stature but is now productive and powerful again. How can you not wonder?

We closed our eyes in 1998, believing the unbelievable in a way so gullible, it seems remarkable in the remembering. A lawless sport created a cheat-or-lose culture in which athletes addicted to looking for advantages policed themselves, then went where no baseball players had ever gone before. One guy in the history of our most historic sport had ever hit 61 homers, and then McGwire and Sammy Sosa both approach 70 in the same season? Incredible.

But now, with our eyes wide open, the joys of mythology have been diluted by cold chemistry. It's a legacy that smears all who inherit it so completely that even Howard, back in the visitors' clubhouse after a 10-inning loss, shrugs his massive shoulders in what-can-you-do frustration.

"The questions are kind of expected," he says. "It bothers me a little bit, but that's the cloud over baseball. Everyone wonders about everything, and it taints the game. It taints everything. We have a drug policy now. It should be, 'If you test positive, then you did it. If you didn't, you didn't.' "

Well, not exactly. Not when there are so many loopholes and secret shortcuts. Reliable tests for human growth hormone don't exist, and even sophisticated doping tests can at once indict and exonerate Marion Jones. If you don't test, like golf, you run the risk of getting as contaminated as baseball. If you test rigorously, like cycling and track, you're going to find out things you don't want to know and still not catch everyone. And if you've managed to create the illusion of policing yourself well, like the NFL, your fans might be tempted to believe all those 350-pound linemen are doing it naturally right up until they find out that even the punters are prowling the pharmacy.

As Red Sox third baseman Mike Lowell says, "The black market is always ahead of the law, so how do we refute anything? You are guilty until you prove yourself innocent."

Naturally or unnaturally, baseball players are larger than they've ever been. (But so too is the average American.) Three very large men—Howard, Albert Pujols and David Ortiz—might have all battered past Roger Maris' ancient record this season if Pujols and Ortiz hadn't missed so much time with ailments. Is it unreasonable to be immediately suspicious when confronted with the unprecedented? Ortiz, a career nobody up until 2003, has spent the past three years dominating the way few have done before. Before Pujols abruptly went on the shelf with a strained oblique on June 4, he had a shot to wipe Bonds' tarnished 73 from the record books after five seasons. And now Howard, at 26, is doing things no one ever has in the 123-year history of the Phillies.

Howard has always been lumberjack large, though not as big as his older brother and not as tall as his twin. His hands and biceps and shoulders are big and thick, but so is his jiggling belly. We're strange about the things we choose to notice. In another game of size and strength, Magic Johnson and Michael Jordan went from stick figures to linebackers. Them, we leave alone. Maybe we like them more.

In Howard's defense (and how did we arrive at a place where we are defending someone who hasn't ever been accused?), he has always and consistently hit the ball far, unlike the suspicious spikes we saw from the formerly flimsy during the Steroids Era. Nobody in organized baseball hit more homers in 2004 than Howard's 48 between Double- and Triple-A and the majors. "Believe it or not, there are big, strong players who get there the old-fashioned way," says A's GM Billy Beane.

Ah yes, the good old days. Back when you could walk into the circus tent and step right up to witness the strong man's amazing feats. Back in that antiquated time when you could still close your eyes and believe in something as old-fashioned as trust.

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