Kneed-ed Relief

Jeff Passan at Yahoo Sports:

Every six months, New York Yankees pitcher Randy Johnson gets injected with a substance in his right knee that allows him to pitch without pain. With the injections, Johnson can work out longer and harder and stay fresh at 43 years old despite the complete lack of cartilage in his knee.

And this treatment – the one that seems to turn back Johnson's clock – is completely legal by Major League Baseball's standards and endorsed by trainers and doctors around the game.

How baseball reconciles Johnson's therapy with the murky world of performance-enhancing drugs is largely a matter of semantics. Doping doctors claim that treatments such as Supartz – Johnson's preferred brand of hyaluronic acid, a substitute for the synovial fluid that keeps joints lubricated – are for therapeutic uses. Drug companies go to lengths not to call hyaluronic acid a drug...

"Without it, my knee would bother me," Johnson said. "It would swell. But the reason why it doesn't swell now is that buffer's in there. If I didn't have that, there would be more swelling and irritation, and I'd have to have my knee drained like it was in the past.

"I could pitch (like that). How effectively and how long, I don't know."

Less pain. Increased performance.

Sound familiar?

This is not an indictment of Johnson or any of the other dozen or so baseball players known to have taken hyaluronic acid as much as it is a showcase of the conundrums created in the intersecting world of modern medicine and baseball. What enhances performance and what rediscovers status quo? And in cases with aging athletes, is achieving what was previously there all of a sudden enhancing performance?

Long-time readers may remember I raised this very issue at our old site. Like Passan, I wasn't trying to slam Johnson. And like Passan, I wondered where the slippery slope of performance-enhancers ended.

No answers yet. Not that I'm expecting an answer anytime soon...