PEDs: The Savior of Baseball

Mason Propper

PEDs: The Savior of Baseball

The steroid era saved baseball.  There I said it.  Now, I’m sure you are reading this thinking, “What is he talking about?” “These athletes hurt their bodies for the entertainment of fans.” For just ten minutes, understand that these athletes made the decision to take this drug and by taking it they did no personal harm to you.  Flash back to baseball in the late eighties and early nineties.  When asked to name the greatest hitters of all time, people often resort to the big names: Babe Ruth, David Ortiz, and Pete Rose.  People never bring up big names from the late eighties and early nineties because baseball was not the national pastime it is today.  Over the course from 1980 to 1995 there were five strikes (the work strike not the baseball “strike”) and one lockout that canceled the 1994 postseason.  These were bad years for the MLB.  Baseball started again in a shortened 1995 season and attendance dropped 12% across the league during a stretch where clubs kept ticket prices down.  Fans still lacked the desire in 1996, when attendance was about 9% less than the season of 1993 ( John-Erik Koslosky).  Then in came Big Mac, Sammy, and Bonds, and with them, hope.

Baseball was in desperate need of an identity at this time.  Hockey had fights, basketball had dunks, and football had big hits.  Baseball did not have anything to stand out from the rest.  The games were long and the action was few and far between.  Most fans did not pay to go to a baseball game to see a 1-0 pitcher’s duel.  If they wanted to see that result, they would have just watched soccer.  Baseball needed something that would separate it from the others.  Mark “Big Mac” McGwire, Sammy Sosa, and Barry Bonds all helped baseball become the game of the long ball.  Once these men entered the league and hit success, attendance started climbing as fast as baseballs flew over the fence.  Baseball was saved.  Fans were raving about Mark McGwire’s five-hundred foot homerun in St. Louis and Sammy’s that left Wrigley field.  In 1998, also known as the homerun race, these two men hit a total of 136 homeruns combined in a season, Mac with 70 and sammy with 66.  Both surpassed the previous untouchable record of 61 homeruns in a season.  Baseball was exciting because these men were conquering unheard of feats.  In 2001, the year Bonds beat McGwire's already untouchable home-run record, attendance increased 44% from 1995.  League revenue grew from $1.4 billion in 1995 to $3.7 billion in 2001 ( John-Erik Koslosky).  Everyone was happy and Baseball was back and better than ever.

However, all good things must come an end at some point.  The league found out that these athletes were cheating and cracked down on the use of performance enhancing drugs.  These once great figures are looked upon as cheaters and liars.  Baseball has become, in this most recent decade, a battle of the pitchers, where hitting 30 homeruns is an accomplishment.  Baseball will never be the same.  And that is the sad thing.  Our kids will never see such an exciting era of the sport of baseball.  No more big brawny figures to look up to and certainly no more seasons with 71 homeruns by one player.  But there is hope.  Baseball now knows what the fans want and that is homeruns and lots of them.  Baseball will adapt to make the game more like the era in which baseball was saved from an uncertainty of identity.

Pressure: To Sink or Swim

There are certain kinds of pressures that contribute to success at Choate and others to failure. Living in such a highly competitive environment, the academic, social, and athletic stress is often too much. Boarding school is an emotional roller-coaster. Even the most stable people find themselves overwhelmed. For the luckier students, Choate teaches people how to perform under pressure. These individuals learn to respond to stress and demands; however, most teachers and adults at Choate do not foster positive attitudes and ways to deal with stress.

Teachers do not understand that while school and an education is paramount for most students, the time management, organization, and overall effort demanded for assignments is extraordinarily exhausting. The ability for a teacher to recognize and student’s workload and have a sense of her abilities to try to work to improve the weaker academic aspects is the difference between a ‘good’ and ‘bad’ teacher. In addition, a teacher must give constructive criticism. A teacher needs to be able to push her students to produce their best work by offering well-reasoned opinions both positive and negative. The nit-picky way teachers at Choate evaluate their students is discouraging. The overly critical approach does not motivate the student to do better next time, but instead, it breaks the students confidence for subsequent assignments.

A similar optimism is crucial in a coaching staff. Without positive encouragement, athletes take the game too seriously. They put the pressure of success on their own shoulders and start defining their self-worth by the outcome of the game. Players need their coaches support to alleviate the stress. An effective coach does not exploit the flaws of one athlete’s game to try and toughen her players. She pushes her athletes to the limit in a way that inspires and makes them believe in themselves. She does not pick on certain players or incessantly express her disapproval of the team dynamic or performance. She observes and gets to know each player individually to try to come up with the best method for the team to reach peak performance. While the most successful players are less likely to crack under pressure, they still need the same encouragement and advice. Ultimately, all teachers and coaches must use an optimistic approach to ease academic stress or motivate their trainees.

The Second First Emperor: The Disappearance of the Books

The icy stare of the White Witch in Narnia is enough to make someone stop in his or her tracks. The alluring mystery of the forbidden door on the third floor in Hogwarts makes one’s hands twitch with curiosity. The sheer power of the gods at Olympus is enough to make someone shrink back in their presence. The mind is free to imagine whatever it wishes when an author describes a certain character or scene; however, books have gotten increasingly less popular ever since programs like Netflix and Hulu came out, and with those websites entering the world, people are losing the experience of reading action-packed books and creating images with the author’s descriptions in their minds. Instead of allowing people to form characters and settings on their own when a book is read, shows and movies directly place a certain template into the viewer’s head that a reader would have been able to interpret on his/her own.

Reading is significantly different from watching shows online or even watching the movie version of the book. The feeling of the book pages between your fingers, the sound of the pages turning as you continue to read, the smell of an old book, they are all the indescribable, memorable, and valued qualities that one can’t find anywhere else. Reading a book brings the reader into an entirely different world that he/she won’t be able to travel to at any other time; the unbelievable experience of reading a book is lost while watching a movie, and maybe in the future it will be lost completely. Who knows, the world today might turn into Montag’s world in Ray Bradbury’s book, Fahrenheit 451 (an amazing book by the way), where books are banned and burned if found. For those who say they don’t read or are born into this new age of technology, sitting down and reading a good book is one experience you cannot miss.

Disasters of Sleep Deprivation

Disasters of Sleep Deprivation 

Students who attend Choate and other academically rigorous school sacrifice sleep in an effort to do as many things as they can in one day. Countless responsibilities are placed on students, including school work, social life, athletics, and extracurriculars. With all their responsibilities, it is not surprising that adolescents need to sacrifice sleep to complete their tasks. Lack of sleep is unhealthy for students, yet it has become socially acceptable because of the competition among teenagers to strive to do their best. 

Cutting out significant hours of sleep is unhealthy because teenagers' bodies cannot fully recuperate with the little sleep they get. In general, 8 hours of sleep is necessary to get enough REM sleep and regenerate neural pathways from the days work. Some studies have even verified that students need up to 9.5 hours to fully recover from the day's work. Choate students work especially hard and should be getting plenty of sleep to refresh themselves. To replace the lost hours of sleep, students turn to methods such as drinking generous amounts of caffeine and sugar-filled energy drinks. Many teens consume stimulating drinks not only during the day, but also late at night to stay awake to finish homework for the next day. Accordingly, students sleep cycles are negatively affected and their bodies become dependent on stimulants for regular energy levels. 

While low sleep levels have been proven to be detrimental for teenagers health, they have become the norm for students. In today's society, teenagers are constantly competing with grades, schools, and even jobs. Therefore, it has been acceptable for students to stay up later and get more done. If students went to bed at a decent hour, they would not have enough time to finish all of their work, and their success at school would be impaired. The standard of little sleep affects others ages as well; now college students and adults will sacrifice sleep to finish their work. If the trend of little sleep continues, then the health of our future generations could be at great risk.

Honest Thoughts on Looking “American”

I accepted I was white a long time ago. The first time I realized I did not look Latin was when my second grade teacher picked on me to tour a new student, fresh from America. She told me in her sweet fluent English that he would feel more comfortable with “someone who looked like him.” Sporting bleach-blonde curls at the time, I realized that it was because I was one of the only ones in my class who had fair skin and light hair. I was known as the “gringa.” Although born and raised in Bolivia, I came from a German and American background, meaning I did not look like a stereotypical Bolivian at all. My hair wasn’t dark, my eyelashes were thin and light, and my skin immediately burned after exposure to the sun. I bombarded myself with questions that a small eight-year-old couldn’t answer. Did the way I looked determine my identity? I ate Bolivian food, spoke fluent Spanish, and felt as Bolivian as ever--yet people around me insisted that I was not like everyone else. I was singled out, but I was far from oppressed. People around me ogled at my blonde curls and told me my skin was so beautiful. I never saw a huge problem with it, and I took every compliment with a kind “thank-you” and a smile--until I moved to the United States.

It’s not often that an American comes across a Bolivian, and that’s okay. After all, we compose the third smallest Hispanic group in the United States. What is not okay is when people stereotype on what we’re supposed to look like. I thought that by moving to the United States I would finally escape a life where I was only known as the American-looking Bolivian; however, I ended up migrating to a country where people think they know what I should look like. In the summer of 2014 I came across one of these people, his name was Nik. Although I can promise that his name is actually spelled like that, I can’t promise that I knew what was going on in his head when I met him. After our introductions, he asked me if what he had heard was correct, “Are you actually from Bolivia?” I wasn’t sure if he was surprised at how I looked or just how far away I’d travelled to get to Lincoln, but it was his following question that made it clear to me. “Wait so why are you white?” Nik asked me, his face serious and genuinely confused. Although I wish I could say that this is all a Mean Girls reference, this instance shaped my view of Americans. It made no sense to me how someone with any kind of education could wonder that to himself, let alone ask it out loud. It made me feel worthless and hesitant about telling people my identity.

My first day at boarding school in Connecticut reaffirmed my conclusion. When I met people and told them about my origins, they either commented on how surprisingly American I looked or asked if I was “actually Bolivian.” Although it bothered me how much they stereotyped Bolivians, it bothered me more that they said this as a compliment. Their gushing voices smiled as they reassured me that I could trick anyone into thinking I was American. Whether intentionally or not, what people were implying was that having white skin and light eyes is something to be proud of and that I should be thankful I don’t look Bolivian. It is not only detrimental to Bolivians, but also to American who aren’t white. As a result, I spent the last year doubting my identity; thinking to myself that life would be so much more simple if I didn’t have to explain to people why I look the way I do.

The Evolution of Choate Rosemary Hall’s Rap Game

It all started on September 17th when Kid Greg released his diss track “King Kwabs,” dissing the eponymous Choate rapper (http://goo.gl/1Kc8ru). Since then, the Choate rap game has expanded to students all around campus. Free-styling and ciphering were activities that only Choate’s underground rappers took part in. Founders Jay Chizzle, the Rosemary Rejects, and Fly Swatter of Choate’s rap club, “Rap it Up,” became the true pioneers of Choate’s “spit me a verse” culture when they started this club. Since then, students have been seen free-styling in common social areas such as the Hill House steps, Mem field, and even the Hill House dining hall.

Multiple tracks have been released, including King Kwab$’s “Kiddie Greg (ft. J. Ro$e)” (http://goo.gl/q5BXD4)  in response to Kid Greg’s diss track,  and “Hillraq,” (http://goo.gl/JlJLYB) a jubilant response to April 17th’s President’s Day. This mass influx of the popularization and campus-wide acceptance of free-styling and rapping leads one to question why it hasn’t gone out of style. Expressing oneself musically is known to relieve one’s mind. Rapping is a form of expression bearing a likeness to poetry.

Poetry's capacity for complexity has often made it unappealing to most students. Rap, however, is perfectly set at the focal point of today’s teenagers’ interest in music. Musical icons such as Drake, Kendrick Lamar, Nicki Minaj, Kanye West, and Iggy Azalea have extended rap's sphere of influence. 

Poetry still has the connotation of being something you do in school, but Rap is cool. Well, rap is basically poetry. Rhythm, rhyme, and other literary tools are simultaneously fundamentals of both poetry and rap. Poetry is a unique tool that has been historically used for self-expression, for self-reflection, and most importantly, for fun. If one cannot see the rhyme or reason as to why Choate’s rap game has evolved, one cannot see that Choate students were unconsciously seeking the poetry their lives needed. Choate students simply need a break from time to time from wanting high GPA’s, fitting in with the crowd, and stressing about getting into a good college.

The Real Twenty One Jump Street

The Real Twenty One Jump Street

Jonah Hill and Channing Tatum star as two undercover cops who go as students in an attempt to stop the spread of an emerging drug in Twenty One Jump Street.  The movie produced $138,447,66 and is a highly rated by the public.  Little do people know that the basic premise of the movie is a reality, except the cops are using students to gather information on drug rings.  The cops in real life track students who purchase drugs and wait for the students to purchase enough for the cops to arrest the student; however, the cops give the students two options: go to jail or be a rat.

Most choose to become a rat.  This choice is made hastily, fearfully, and instinctually.  Going to jail for these students means the possibility of being expelled, confessing to their parents, asking someone for bail, and obtaining a criminal record.  Here enlies a problem.  The students are basically being blackmailed.  Many times students do not have a lawyer present and have no way to understand all of their legal options.  They are also making a potentially dangerous decision.  If a drug dealer discovers that the student is working with the police, the drug dealer may assault the student in some way.  Andy, a student from Mississippi, attended a junior college and was faced with this decision in 2011.  His initial reaction was, “I’m fucked.”  This reaction illustrates that the police were now planning on using him, and in return Andy would not have to be locked behind bars.  Lafayette County Metro Narcotics Unit uses about 30 other students like Andy each year.  A study of four major cities in 1955 shows that 92% of search warrants involving drugs were sought after because of information provided by students like Andy.  

The debate over whether or not students should be used as police informants has no clear resolution.  Are the police helping young adults or are they just using them?  Why not just warn the students and help them stop using, then they would not be at risk as a rat?  Maybe the informants are too essential to the police in bringing down the “real” bad guys.  Also, who decides what students to cut the deals with and who to just flat out arrest?  Some kind of regulations need to be put into place so these students are not being taken advantage of.

(All specific facts are found in the article linked below)

http://www.buzzfeed.com/albertsamaha/mississippi-cops-are-using-college-kids-as-drug-informants#.nq9NaqZpde

Are You Really Who You Say You Are?

I consider myself a Floridian born, Bahamian raised, American, South African, Chinese, Jew who has lived in New York, Connecticut, and Colorado. Okay yes, this may sound a bit absurd and possibly false; however, this cannot be closer to the truth. Ever since I could remember, people have asked me, “Where are you from?” This is perhaps because of peoples’ human nature to be curious. The reason why I bring to light my heritage is to ask, where can someone say he or she is from? Can I say I am from the Bahamas? Is it correct to explain that I am a South African? Would it be wrong to call myself an American? I am continuously faced with this issue. I never know where to call home.

            My answer to this problem is quite simple. Instead of facing the “Where are you from?” question with weariness, instead embrace it. Rather than explaining your whole backstory, state where you feel you are from. Being raised in the Bahamas, I feel that my Bahamian roots are more prominent than my South African, American, Chinese background. It is true that I do not hold a Bahamian citizenship or currently reside there, but that is beside the point. I consider myself a Bahamian because the Bahamas has shaped me as a person. During each day of my life, everything that I do has been influenced by my childhood in the Bahamas. Whether it be walking around barefoot or playing outdoor soccer, my habits and interests have been formed around my Bahamian days. No matter where I live, I will always be Bahamian at heart. I now ask the question, what makes you, you? Is it your family’s ethnicity, childhood, or personal interests? Whatever it is, let everyone know who you really are. I am Tai Kerzner and I am from the great islands of the Bahamas.

No Longer a Failure: An Asian-American’s Reflections on the Difficulties of Learning Chinese and how to Overcome Them

      Chinese is a very difficult language, and the fact that my family had spoken Chinese for thousands of years did not make it any easier to learn. Like many other Chinese-Americans, I went to Chinese school as a child and struggled to learn Chinese. In this aspect I am like the millions of first generation Chinese-Americans who have struggled to learn their ethnic language. However, I think that I am especially qualified to write on this topic because Chinese was especially difficult for me. As someone who once failed every single Chinese test he had taken for around seven years but has now improved to an AP level, I am more familiar with the challenges of learning Chinese than most. In this article, I explore some of the challenges that I attribute to the difficulty of learning Chinese for anyone not raised in China.

     One characteristic that makes Chinese so incredibly challenging to learn is the difficulty of practical Chinese. It’s critical to understand this point, because the rest of this article is dependent on this observation. Written and spoken Chinese are filled with difficult, uncommon words that make reading and conversing in this language nearly impossible for many students. In addition, Chinese is full of idioms, allusions, and special phrases that make it even more difficult for those learning the language to communicate. I think that this characteristic is pretty unique to Chinese because my friends in AP Spanish and French don’t have this problem – they can converse impressively, and read newspaper articles and even novels. However, I am far from their level and can’t even stumble through a short newspaper clipping by myself. I've taken Chinese for over ten years but am still less literate than a first-grader.

     The challenge of communicating has some important ramifications that make learning Chinese especially difficult. One of the most effective ways to learn Chinese, and a method commonly used by schools in China, is to read prodigious amounts of Chinese. Articles, short stories, essays, anything that can be read off a screen or a textbook. By reading vast amounts of Chinese, one can further one’s understanding of the language and its grammar while improving one’s vocabulary. In fact, I have found that if I have read a character enough in writing, I can write it without going through the arduous task of rote memorization. However, because reading Chinese is so difficult for students not raised in China, students normally can’t utilize this method and are left with endless rote memorization. Although rote memorization is both boring and inefficient, Chinese students are often left with no other alternative and spend countless hours scribbling characters with minimum return.

Chinese students often spend countless hours memorizing
characters with minimum return.

      There are other ways, however, to learn Chinese that I find much more effective than mindless memorization. Watching the news or other videos that contain plenty of dialogue consistently is an effective way to increase one’s ability in Chinese given enough time. However, the key with this approach is consistency and time. One has to consistently watch these videos over a few months to see the results and many people give up before then. But if one persists, his or her Chinese really will improve at a tremendous rate.

     Replacing handwritten vocabulary quizzes with typed recognition quizzes is another way to better learn Chinese. The idea behind this method is to make it possible for students to read Chinese text, so that the student can improve their Chinese ability by reading. This is probably the most effective way of learning to read and write Chinese, though it is still considerably difficult. However, any one of these strategies are better than just rote memorization.

     Chinese is a difficult language – yes – but learning Chinese doesn’t have to be as hard as many people make it to be. There are significant challenges for those not raised in China, but learning Chinese is definitely possible for those willing to put in the work. And the good news is that it gets easier – the better one’s Chinese is, the easier it is to improve it. The hardest part of learning Chinese is the beginning; afterwards it only gets easier.

How I Got Here.

Lets talk about how I got here. No, we’re not going to talk about “privilege,” because we all (should) know that privilege has been thrown around so much that it no longer carries any meaning, and as such doesn’t add anything to conversations. I’m going to tell you about I got from the beginning of freshman year to the present day.

It all started on one sunny day in early September of 2012. I got to Choate as tubby six-foot-tall pile of awkward. The small middle school I went to previously (and I mean small: fifty people for a K-8 school) had passed fairly uneventfully, and the transition from this tiny school to Choate was a shock, to say the least. I went from a microcosm of a six-person eighth grade class to a eight hundred student school. As such, I developed a very tight-knit group of friends in Mem House over the course of the year.

Sophomore year was when things started going downhill. The group of friends I had in Mem drifted apart. It was hard to make new friends, and eventually I gave up trying. My grades tanked, my social life had tumbleweed blowing through it. I gained 40 extra pounds of gravitational field in that time as well, which not only made people want to talk even less, it made me hate the way I looked. I’d wake up in the morning and look in the mirror and see that achievement of loneliness hanging over my belt. Then I’d put on mask of humor to try to hide the emptiness inside and get through the day, and end up back in bed at the end of the day ready to do it all over again.

So that sucked. There’s a light at the end of the tunnel though. In the summer of last year, I clocked in at my highest weight ever, 257 pounds. That’s almost as heavy as an average baby killer whale. I motivated myself to do something about it. I started going to the gym, and more importantly I stopped treating my face like a garbage disposal. It’s been slow going, but eventually I lost almost 30 pounds. I’m still a social wreck, but at least I’m a slightly less round social wreck.

What’s interesting about the whole ordeal is how alone I felt during it. I never, ever, felt like there was someone who I could talk to. There’s a giant stigma against men speaking their feelings as it shows “weakness,” and that stigma has caused incalculable harm to millions of men who otherwise would have been able to seek help. Even Choate’s own body positivity club was women-only until last year, and to this day almost all of its meetings are women-only.

Just some food for thought.

How to Communicate with Yourself in an Alternate Universe

The concept of infinity can be hazy and confusing. If our universe is infinite and expands forever, does that mean that every possible version of everything must exist? If so there would be incalculable versions of us on different planets who have already altered their life or somewhere down the road will. Now subtracting the versions of yourself that already made a different decision somewhere, think of the you’s who are still living the same life as you but somewhere in the future will deviate from the path. These countless versions of you are also currently reading a philosophical blog post that probably stopped making sense a while ago.

Get ready to experience that hollow feeling that you get when things get too philosophical and your life momentarily becomes a tangle of uncertainty. Lets think back to the versions of yourself that are still reading this. If you point up at the sky (for dramatic effect) and yell “Hi me!” then the you’s who are still on the same course as you also just pointed at the sky and yelled “Hi me!” Then comes the moment of realization that you all just acknowledged each other’s existence. The innumerable versions of you on other planets somewhere in this infinite expanse were just connected in this realization. So if the cosmos really are never-ending, and every possible deviation of life must exist, then whenever you feel lonely you can connect with the versions of you with a simple thought or a point to the sky and a “Hi me!”

Crew = Pain

            There are times when every rower questions why he or she does crew. There are countless reasons to hate a sport that causes so much pain and suffering. Rowing is a synonym for pain, as a former Yale rower once said, “having a vacuum cleaner stuck down your throat while having sulfuric acid splashed on your legs.” You could hate crew when you have hours of practice everyday, and you are always late to every commitment because your practice was longer than expected. After your coach calls across the line of boats that you are doing one more piece, even though you feel like you will most definitely die of exhaustion. When you have practice on a machine called an erg, but better known as the creation of Satan himself.  When you look down at your hands and hardly recognize them since they are covered in so many blisters and callouses. When it seems normal to discuss different methods of not stopping a workout because things start to go fuzzy and little stars begin to creep in on the sides of your vision, or which direction you should lean to when you have to vomit. ­And just when your workout is over and you land on the dock, you have to lift the boat, a torrent of water dumping on your head and go on to carry a 120lb boat back to the boathouse. The list could go on forever.

            So why would anybody who started rowing ever actually stick with it? Because although lows can be incredibly low, the highs more than make up for them. What makes a sport based pain manageable is that you know that your teammates beside you are going through the exact same thing. They become the only ones who can understand some of your stranger habits, such as staring at excel spreadsheets of different workouts for prolonged periods of time intently looking at the differences in milliseconds.Suffering together creates a bond unlike any other. What makes you keep rowing is knowing that your teammates in your boat are going through exactly what you are, and you cannot let them down. The pain is only temporary. Rowing is the only racing sport where you can see the people you are beating, and nothing in the world feels better to watch other crews getting farther and farther away from you. Crew is a sport for the slightly crazy. It shows you pain you never thought you could feel, but because of that pain it shows you determination you never thought you were capable of. Rowing is a sport that is unlike any other in the physical and mental grit it requires, and shows you a part of yourself you never knew existed.