Ken Burns, acclaimed documentarian, once made a defining series of documentaries about baseball, entitled “Baseball.” The main thesis behind this work was that baseball stood as a mirror for the United States of America. The documentary shows how the sport tracked the nation, from its founding on American soil, through two World Wars, and all the way up through the economic battles of the late 20th century. There were 9 innings to Burns’s documentary, the last of which brought baseball and America up to the early 1990’s.

Burns apparently has plans to extend his documentary past the to today, and I think the thesis fits the last 15 years; the era in baseball that most consider to span this time – the Steriod Era – also has important parallels to and lessons for present-day America as both the country and its pasttime recover from a period of short-sightedness at both the individual and societal level.

First, lets consider steroids themselves, and why they are bad. In my opinion, the problem with steroids aren’t that they make you better at what you do. Rather, the problem is that they do so at a great cost to your body in the long term. The fact that baseball players took performance-enhancing drugs despite these ill effects stands as a tremendous example of choosing short-term gratification while ignoring the long-term consequences of one’s actions. Similarly, the sport as a whole made a similar choice in refusing to regulate or monitor the clubhouses of its teams, allowing for a temporary boom in player performance at the expense of long-term damages to the integrity of the sport. Ultimately, the sport paid a price for its trangressions in a damaged image, which is nothing compared to the ultimate price paid by one of the players of the Steroid Era, Ken Caminiti.

Unfortunately, baseball and its athletes were not alone in their propensity to take short cuts to immediate gains without concern for longer time scales. Our country and its individual citizens have also taken on this mentality in many aspects of our lives. The societal and personal actions that stand as evidence for this are many: the neglect of climate change during both policy and lifestyle decision-making, our repeated build up of national and personal debts, our preference for unhealthy “fast food,” and for subsidies that have helped make these foods lighter on the wallet, a policy of deregulation of credit markets to spur growth, and the resulting individual choices for people to take on loans they could not afford to pay off. The results of all this have been disasterous. As a nation, we’re in debt, overweight, sick, and living in an environment sure to bring more pains to an economy that is already in shambles due in part to the inability of one set of individuals to pay off their mortgages and the inability of another set of individuals to value the packaged mortgages they created and traded.

The good news is that our society seems to be waking up from this period of short-sightedness. Most Americans are aware of climate change, believe our society is contributing to it, and are conscious of how they affect climate as individuals. Similarly, both Presidential candidates acknowledge this scientific consensus on climate change and are in favor of capping CO2 emissions (although their plans do differ in important details). Fast food consumption is on the decline, and our national debt is likely to go down during the next 8-10 years. More certain than that is that regulation of credit markets will be tighter, and that the criteria for lending will grow more stringent. Likewise, baseball has started to monirtor and punish the use of performance-enhancing drugs, and individual players appear to have decreased their use. Hopefully, this optimistic outlook is an accurate preview of the 11th inning of the relationship between our nation and its pasttime.