* ForeWord sidebar: "And now a word from our druggist"

Raymond Angelo Belliotti’s Watching Baseball, Seeing Philosophy devotes a chapter to Jose Canseco and the questionable use of performance enhancing drugs. The December 2007 release of the Mitchell Report—the exhaustive study by Major League baseball into the use of such substances—has opened the door for several new books on the subject.

With all the hubbub, one would think the use of such pharmaceuticals is a late twentieth-century phenomenon. But according to The Dark Side of Baseball: Gambling, Violence, Drugs and Alcohol in the National Pastime by Roger I. Abrams (Rounder), better playing through chemistry is almost as old as the game itself. James “Pud” Galvin, a ninteenth-century Hall of Fame pitcher, is on record as having taken testosterone injections in 1889. Abrams, a law professor at Northeastern University whose previous books include Legal Bases: Baseball and The Law and The First World Series and the Baseball Fanatics of 1903, investigates some other dubious behavior, including recreational drug and alcohol abuse, violence on and off the field, and gambling, which pre-dates even the infamous 1919 Black Sox Scandal in which a group of eight players conspired to throw the 1919 World Series. The upshot of Dark Side is that everything old seems to be new again.

MLB.com senior writer Jonathan Mayo conceived of Facing Clemens: Hitters on Confronting Baseball’s Most Intimidating Pitcher (Lyons Press) well before the Mitchell Report. As a result, the thirteen batters he interviewed might want to revise their expressions of praise and awe. Mayo offers a variety of players, from stars like Cal Ripken Jr. and Ken Griffey Jr. to raw rookies, including Clemens’ son, Koby, who faced his dad in the minor leagues. Mayo uses just the right amount of statistics to bolster his thesis without turning his book into something only “statheads” would find palatable.

In a reversal of popular opinion, Asterisk: Home Runs, Steroids, and the Rush to Judgment by David Ezra (Triumph). Bonds, who became the all-time home run leader in 2007, may be a bad teammate and a jerk, the author concedes, but that shouldn’t tar him with the steroid brush. Ezra, an attorney by profession, goes about knocking down the arguments that Bonds “juiced.” Whether his arguments are convincing or not remains for the objective reader to decide; rightly or not, others have already made up their minds.