Bob Cook

So when baseball players in August start exhibiting a lack of speed, is it due to the heat the dog days of summer, or is it due to, literally, a lack of speed?

Here’s the thing: through years of attention on steroids, we are all now trained to identify athletes who look a little too puffed up, just like how nearly a decade of “Will and Grace” installed gaydar into mainstream America and trained it.

But amphetamines, the other drug that this year became test fodder in the major leagues, are a little more difficult to figure out. In the ballpark or watching on TV, you generally don’t get close enough to see if a batter’s eyes are dilated. A player could have dropped an easy fly ball because he was thinking about his dinner plans, not because he failed to start his day with a hot, steaming cup of Jason Grimsley Leaded Coffee.

On a hot day, is a player’s sweat from exertion, or a side effect of the bennies he took that morning? If an announcer says a player cranked a home run, are we to infer he believes he did it with the help of crank?

It also might be more difficult to track who has stopped taking amphetamines and who hasn’t because their use has been so pervasive.

Various histories point to speed becoming a part of sports thanks to World War II vets — who took it to stay awake and alert for long missions — introducing it to the playing field when they returned.

Nobody really thought amphetamines to be much of an issue until Jim Bouton, of course, discussed them at length in “Ball Four” in 1970. That year, the federal government banned their being used without a prescription.

Not that that’s stopped just about anybody in any sport who needs a pick-me-up with a little more strength than a can of soda. Some guesses have ranged to up to 80 percent of baseball players using them, which might seem a tad high. But, no doubt, many athletes are, as Boston pitcher David Wells passed on in his autobiography, “beaning up” before games.

And not just in baseball. It’s become a matter of (exaggerated) truth that hockey players are second behind meth-lab operators in their consumption of Sudafed. The NBA already tests for amphetamines. The NFL is set to test for them starting in 2007. Amphetamines were the first drugs Olympic sports banned. Pre-Floyd Landis, one of professional cycling’s biggest drug scandals involved a series of riders dropping dead in the late 1960s after amping up before races.

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Athletes take this boost for the same reason the rest of us line up once (or more) per day at Starbucks, which cops to having more caffeine in its coffee — twice as much as a cup of Folger’s — than any other major brand. Or why college students take Adderall or Ritalin for all-night cramming sessions. Or why I often grab a Starbucks grande americano or a can of Cherry Coke before writing one of these columns. It’s not that the drugs make you better — they stop you from being worse.

As former Red Sox and Expos pitcher Bill Lee and co-writer Dick Lally put it in his 1984 autobiography, “The Wrong Stuff,” amphetamines “were being used to sober up. [A player] did it to get his pulse going on the morning after the night before.”

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