THE OLD BONG GAME

The New York Mets ended their lacklustre season this past weekend amid
allegations of widespread marijuana use. The initial report didn't name
names -- of sources or of players -- except for those of Tony Tarasco and Mark
Corey, benchwarmers who a few months ago fessed up to a night of
pot-smoking, and Grant Roberts, a relief pitcher who was shown doing a bong
hit in a photograph provided to Newsday by an angry (and allegedly
extortionary) Long Island woman. One "friend" of the team claimed that a
player had had someone stowpot in peanut-butter jars to elude bomb-sniffing
dogs at Shea, and another said that Mets minor leaguers buried their weed
and accoutrements near hotels so that they could dig up the stash the next
time they were in town.

In the wake of these reports, columnists have observed that if the Mets had
demonstrated the kind of energy on the field that they seem to have exerted
in devising ways to get high, they might have had a shot at the pennant. At
least, they probably would not have led the major leagues in errors. To some
commentators, however, the connection between cannabis consumption and
lacklustre performance is less clear. Steve Bloom is the manager of the
softball team at High Times, a New York-based magazine for marijuana
enthusiasts. Since 1996, the team, the Bonghitters, has gone 50-8-4, and
only recently ended an amazing three-year winning streak. Bloom attributes
this success to a disciplined regimen.

"Part of the secret for us personally is that we don't go out on the field
too stoned," Bloom said the other day. "You don't smoke just before you go
out on the field, 'cause you kinda lose your concentration. Baseball's a
concentration game. People here may smoke during the day, doing whatever
they're doing. I don't keep tabs on every player. And, you know, they may or
may not wake 'n' bake. But, basically, we'll smoke one in the car on the way
up to the game, and that's the extent of it. And then we go out and do our
batting practice and play our game, and then maybe in the middle of the
game, if we really feel so inspired or feel we need a rally joint or
something, we light one up. But it's generally kind of an after-game thing.

"Not overdoing it is the best thing, when it comes to baseball," he went on.
"Maybe in football and contact sports, where you're banging into each other,
you'd feel it a little less. Or in basketball, where you're out there sort
of instinctively doing things very quickly, moving very fast. With baseball,
you're standing around the outfield for days, you know. It's easy to zone
out. You gotta run from first to third when there's one out and the ball's
hit to short right. One of our worst things is our baserunning, and we have
guys who get in rundowns, and get thrown out. They're not concentrating. So
it might be partially because they're stoned."

Bloom mentioned that his pitcher, Kyle Kushman, who covers cultivation
issues for the magazine, does tend to keep a joint burning throughout the
game. "Being the pitcher, I have a single task," Kushman said. "And the pot
allows me to have kinda almost like tunnel vision, and narrow my focus. But
it's not good for making rapid multiple-choice decisions, like being a
shortstop, where you have a million choices as the ball is coming to you. Is
this guy running or is he not running? But for me, for pitching, which is
basically a repetition thing, like hitting, it's very good. It's like
bowling, kinda. You wanna bowl a three hundred? Well, when you're stoned you
put 'em down every time." (Grant Roberts, it might be worth mentioning, has
the second-best earned-run average on the Mets.)

"But it's not to be taken lightly," Kushman said, "because THC is a
miraculous substance. It's just so hard to quantify and qualify." Once,
toking up in the office a few years ago, he blacked out and fell into the
lap of a colleague. If he were a professional athlete, he says, he would
save the smoke for after the game. "I think that I would have the
self-control to give the respect that's due to the position that I've been
given, should I get called up from the Bonghitters."