Steroids are like the ghosts of Christmas past in baseball.
Now that testing is solidly in place—even for human growth hormone—the league and possibly the players would probably look at the steroid issue as very old, unwelcome news. They would rather it be swept under a rock—or better, forgotten.
Like the boogeyman or the endless variations of Chucky the killer doll, the issue pops up like an unwanted toy when players from that era come up for the Hall of Fame.
Angst-driven, the writers and former players who follow the game are twisted into all sorts of shapes in trying to come up with their own position over the issue.
Keith Olbermann, who cut his teeth on ESPN before becoming a political commentator, told MLB Network’s Clubhouse Confidential that it is an “awful thing,” but there will be players who will not go into the Hall because of “an assumption” that they were not clean. “But that is going to be the case,” he concluded.
One of the more popular outs is to say that a player was a Hall of Famer before he turned—Darth Vader-like—to the dark side of the game. That’s what some are saying about Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens and Alex Rodriguez.
Clemens, who has a 354-184 win-loss mark and a bucket of Cy Youngs, insists he never used ‘roids, no matter what his former trainer says.
Bonds, who has 762 dingers, seven MVP awards and is a 14-time All-Star, said he used a cream but never knowingly juiced.
A-Rod, a career .302 hitter with 629 homers, said he used them in Texas, but never with the Yankees.
One of the tragedies in this whole sorry mess is that a lot of people don’t believe them. The face value of what they say has more holes than the Titanic.
A lot of people think of it this way:
“Regardless of the verdict of juries, no player who throws a ball game, no player who undertakes or promises to throw a ball game, no player who sits in confidence with a bunch of crooked ballplayers and gamblers, where the ways and means of throwing a game are discussed and does not promptly tell his club about it, will ever play professional baseball.”
That came from Kenesaw Mountain Landis, the baseball commissioner put in place after the Black Sox scandal almost a century ago. If you put in that statement a phrase that no player who uses steroids will ever be part of baseball, well, you get the idea.
I just cannot chop a player’s career like a pork chop, divvying up the Hall of Fame part where he is clean and the part where he looked like he was juiced, and chuck that into the garbage bin.
These players are all of a piece and not detachable like Lego parts.
The steroid era really jacks up your level of appreciation for a player like Derek Jeter or Pedro Martinez. Their bodies never ballooned like the Michelin man. They aged when they were supposed to and you never got the sense they were cheating the game.
Pedro put it well when he recently told writers at an event at the Liberty Hotel in Boston:
“I’m glad I didn’t do [steroids], even though I was criticized for missing one or two or three starts a year for sometimes being in pain and expressing it.” (He pointed out how player recovery times were significantly less when they were using steroids.)
“I’m glad I did it clean, and I’m really extremely sorry for those guys that have to make that decision to go the wrong way, because I know baseball is hard enough to play by itself, and now carrying over such a bad reputation is not anything you want to have after such a beautiful job and a beautiful career. It’s sad but it’s your choice and you’re responsible for the steps you take.”
Like the houses, plumbing fixtures and what-have-you from the massive earthquake in Japan that is starting to wash up in the Pacific Northwest of the U.S., the fallout of the steroids era is oozing out of a history that the league would rather forget.
Why is this issue so important?
Playing fair and with honor should matter because the numbers are the only tangible legacy a player leaves behind. And those are numbers compiled by players going back to the late 19th century.
Simply put, they are sacred to the game.
Football may be the most popular sport in the country—but baseball is part of the soul and fabric of the United States.
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