Steroids and Wild
By Tom Grout
December 27, 2007
-I’m sorry I am going to bring up steroids again because quite frankly I am getting tired of it and I wish it would go away. They need to clean up all the sports, not just baseball, and I don’t see that happening.
What I find interesting is that the players who are having a hard time admitting to taking something are the ones who have the most to lose. Since the Mitchell Report came out there has been a half dozen or so players who have come out and said that yes, they did take something. Then they gave their reason for doing it, apologized and now in most cases they have been forgiven.
It’s the ones who have Hall of Fame aspirations that have had a hard time coming forward. We all know the Congressional Hearings of a few years ago. McGuire and his not wanting to talk about the past which at the time is all he had since he was retired. Sosa, with losing his grasp of the English language all of a sudden. Who can for get Palmeiro pointing his finger at congress and saying that he did not use performance enhancing drugs when we already knew that wasn’t true. He was the first commercial spokesman for Viagra. We all know that Viagra is just the start before you go one to other things. (Ok, I’m smiling a little about that one. Step up to the plate there Rafael!)
Bonds has denied steroid use by saying he didn’t know what he was putting into his body. Don’t you think it’s odd that a guy doesn’t know what he puts into himself? I know what I put into myself and most of it is making me fat right now.
Roger Clemens is the latest of the “I didn’t do it” bunch. In fact he is going on 60 Minutes this Sunday and tell us he didn’t do it.
What these guys have to lose is their records and a chance at the Hall of Fame. If they didn’t do it, fine prove it. There seems to be some witnesses that say they did. These are the same people that the other players are saying were right about them. They did take something; they did buy it from this guy. That gives the accusers some credibility.
I hope these guys can prove their innocence. I want to look at what they accomplished and not see it tainted. Right now though they look a little guilty.
-The Wild sucked it up a little bit last night, or I should say they sucked it up a lot last night against the Dallas Stars. I would have hated to be the Wild players and face coach Lemaire after that one.
When I first saw Wild player Aaron Voros I mentioned that he resembled Mike Modano, the old North Star and now Dallas Star. In yesterdays Pioneer Press they said the same thing. They may look alike but their games are different as Modano is more of a skill player and Voros a more physical one.
Voros is one of my favorite players though as he plays the game fast and furious and truly enjoys what he is doing.
The Wild will turn it around again.
They look alot better then our other fall/winter sports teams!
Clemens is adamant that he is NOT guilty of controlled substance abuse.
Could this be true?
We have already condemned (through the press)these athletes for their alleged acts, without due process.
Although I am not naive enough to think that they're all guilty of all implicated offenses, I do believe where there's smoke there's fire.
Maybe we should condemn _all_ professional athletes, as to have been fortunate enough to make it that far, they must have done something that set them apart from us mediocre ones.
Proving that they took/did controlled substances at the time that they were prohibited by the sanctioning bodies, will be one tough assignment.
Can you imagine being the Judge/Reporter/Whistle Blower that ruins the career of our children's heroes?
Either way, we all lose.
I think the only way to handle the steroid situation is to start fresh in the here and now. Starting in '08, if you test positive, you're done. As far as the past is concerned, there's no good option, as so many players were involved. The records will stand, and down the the road a few years, it may or may not be obvious what effect steroids really did have on the record books. If it turns out that there is an obvious spike during the "steroid years", then that will be shown, and those records will be forever "self-asterisked".
Tom –
Again a very good piece of writing. And no, you aren’t raising the issue too often. You make a good point that those athletes with the most to lose are seemingly the most reluctant to confess to illicit drug use. Its more than simply the greed of their desire for a HOF ticket. And its more than the lifetime of potential endorsement money stretched out to the horizon. For those athletes who have dedicated their lives to their craft and have performed at elite level for their entire careers, it is also about personal pride and personal reputation – how they are viewed by the fans, by their families, and how they view themselves. Its got to be hard to look your wife and kids in the eye and tell them you cheated. But the worst is to be falsely accused.
We have heard denials of performance enhancing drug use that run the gamut from the preposterous to the very credible. Not hard to know what to think about those. But how do you sort out the ones in the middle? People are too fond of saying that in America you’re innocent until proven guilty. That’s only true in a courtroom in a criminal case, where there are precise rules about what can be considered, and how. Outside the courthouse none of this applies. It is natural to want to know if they “can prove their innocence”. So it matters what they say, and how they say it. And do we base our decisions on what others think? Does it matter if a player is well liked? Should it matter? That’s up to each of us, I guess.
But here’s the deal: in the court of public opinion, how do you “prove yourself innocent”? There’s no requirement that your accuser has to face you, that you get to cross examine, and there are no rules preventing you from getting tarred up by hearsay, slander, innuendo, rumor, inference.
So how do you do prove your innocence in the court of public opinion when your accuser is supposedly someone who told a trainer that told a Mitchell Commission staffer that five years ago or seven years ago you paid $165 for a box, the implication being that the box contained steroids that you immediately shot into your veins? Do you prove your innocence with a denial on your word of honor? How does that work when what has been smeared is precisely your word of honor? What a miserable situation.
The answer of course, is documentation. I, for one, have started making a daily entry in my personal journal that says “today I did not take any performance enhancing substances”. I intend to have it ready if I am ever the one being accused.
Talk about innocent untill proven guilty all you want, but if the investigators did not have positive and conclusive proof of Bonds and Clemens using banned substances thier names would not of been included in the report, as I am sure that thier are others who have violated this policy but have not been named yet. Pete Rose claimed his innocence for years, the commissioner would not have banned him for life without proof he had gambled on baseball. The Mitchell report lawyers know what they are doing.
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