In a typically unfunny and wrongheaded piece, Rick Reilly called for the MVP Awards won by those caught up in the PED hysteria to be turned over to the "clean" runners-up. http://sports.espn.go.com/espnmag/story?id=3915217
Pu tting aside that the degree to which the drugs aid performance in a statistically significant way has not been quantified, among the players Reilly chose as his new NL MVPs are Mike Piazza, Albert Pujols, and Luis Gonzalez.
These are Gonzo's career home run totals for each of his 19 big league seasons:
0, 13, 10, 15, 8, 13, 15, 10, 23, 26, 31, 57, 28, 26, 17, 24, 15, 15, 8.
Should we play "one of these things is not like the other"?
I don't know what Gonzo took and I don't care, but it highlights the silliness of asterisk-mania. Yesterday's "A-Rod will give us a clean home run king!" becomes today's "look at how his lip quivers, that means he's telling a half truth!"
You don't know who took what, and you don't know what impact any of it had.
But yet, still, we are ripping and shredding away at a handful of guys, destroying legacies, threatening liberty. We've gone all Shirley Jackson, seemingly randomly choosing to destroy Player Y while leaving Player X intact. Barry Bonds goes to jail - Jason Giambi gets moustache day at Yankee Stadium.
It's foolish when placed in any kind of context.
In a baseball context, you have NL umpire Tim McClellan from Monday's Dan Partrick Radio Show saying somewhat bravely that he doesn't care at all about what anyone took prior to the drug testing policy in 2004.
http://ht.cdn.turner.com/si/danpatrick/audio/2009/02 /23/DP_Hr2_02-23-2009_stream.mp3
McClellan's argument wasn't complicated. PED use wasn't against the rules prior to 2004 (and no, memos from commissioners didn't make it so, the office didn't have that unilateral ability - nor, of course, were the memos serious - there was never an attempt to enforce any type of PED policy, too much money rained down upon the owners for that to happen) and there has always been a boatload of actual breaking of the baseball rules, doctoring bats, balls, diamonds has always been part and parcel of our national pastime. Gaylord Perry's a confessed career long cheater; with full knowledge of that, the BBWA put him in the HOF. Whitey Ford cheated with winks and smiles, but his manipulation of the ball is legendary.
Patrick's response was typical, effectively saying: Can you really compare corking a bat to taking steroids?
Why not? Why no congressional hearings, meetings with the commissioner, years of outrage from sports pundits? When will Mike Lupica call Whitey Ford a disgrace? Isn't cheating cheating?
Patrick's additional response was, of course, that even if PEDs weren't against the rules, they were against the law - and that matters!
Know what else is illegal? Gambling. Is there a baseball clubhouse where illegal gambling doesn't occur constantly? Card games. NCAA pools. Golf. Constant violations of the law.
Where is the outrage?
I read Ball Four just like everyone else; I can never recall being a sports fan and not knowing that ballplayers gobbled speed like candy. Baseball players took illegal drugs to gain an advantage. They did it in the 80s, the 70s, the 60s and the 50s.
John Perricone, who has consistently and thoroughly been right about steroid use, recently unearthed a Sports Illustrated piece from 40 years ago in which the entire 1960s sports landscape was said to be awash in steroids. http://www.onlybaseballmatters.com/archives/2009/02/ 20/history-lesson-3/
Is there any debate about this? Taking drugs without prescriptions have always been part of baseball culture. And that's putting aside the gallons of cortisone athletes have pumped into their bodies their entire lives. Kirk Gibson gets shot up to hit a home run and he's a hero, Alex Rodriguez gets shot up to hit a home run and he loses his reputation.
How will the future regard this current hystorical period?
There's a book by Ray Kurzweil, called The Singularity is Near, the thesis of which is that by 2045, people will have merged with machines in ways that will effectively mean the end of the biological human being. The idea that when Alex Rodriguez retires ten years from now and then is first eligible for the HOF five years after that we'll still be consumed by what type of ointment he used in 2002 doesn't really seem worthy of serious discussion.
We've had a bad decade, you and me. There was a C-Span poll of American historians last week ranking each of the 43 US Presidents. I tend to distrust rankings like that, viewing American Presidents much like I view baseball managers - largely as fungible figureheads. The Phillies won the World Series in 2008 and Charlie Manuel was "in charge" but he deserves as much credit as McKinley does for "winning" the Spanish-American War. You can take the guy sitting in the dugout, I want Cole Hamels charging up San Juan Hill.
But there are exceptions. Malcolm Gladwell's new book Outliers discusses the commonalities of exceptionally successful people; I tend not to view the world this way; I see as outliers the people who are truly, painfully destructive - so painfully bad at their jobs that they cause incalculable harm. I didn't vote for Barack Obama because I thought he would bring hope to the hopeless - I voted for Barack Obama because George Bush spent 8 years destroying the ballclub. I don't need Obama to be Earl Weaver; I need him to stop giving Neffi Perez 450 plate appearances.
In two decades, historians may analyze the first decade of this millennium as the one from which the US couldn't recover. The economy never comes back, the engendered international hatred blows back time and time again - and the environmental collapse leads to conversations like "Remember when we had running water all 7 days a week? We were like Aqua Emperors! Now sacrifice the rabbit to Poseidon and pray we are allowed to bathe this week."
The American Empire was collapsing, will go the thesis of book upon book in 2030- and the media was consumed with Alex Rodriguez taking a variant of a drug that we now put in pre-natal vitamins. Instead of hearings about subprime lending and torture we hauled Rafael Palmeiro to Capital Hill. Alberto Gonzalez and Karl Rove got to walk free and Roger Clemens was a grand jury target. Dick Cheney, who hasn't left the US since 2010 for fear of being captured and hauled to the Hague for his much deserved war crimes trial lies in his hyperbaric chamber but Barry Bonds's trainer's mother in law had her house stormed by fifty-five federal agents.
We'll be owned by the Chinese. But at least Luis Gonzalez will have his MVP Award.