How fitting.
On the day MLB announced it would supply players (sell them, actually) with legal supplements, the most damning allegations yet regarding Barry Bonds’ use of illegal ones are about to hit the street according to a story on ESPN’s web site.
Excerpts from Game of Shadows, written by San Francisco Chronicle reporters Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams, will appear this week in Sports Illustrated. The full book is scheduled to be released later this month.
6 comments:
The excerpt to slated to appear in the upcoming issue of SI has already been posted online. Only click through if you have the time -- it's 14 pages.
More and more I am leaning toward very harsh terms for drug abuse in sports. One strike and you're out for the season. Period. Nothing short of that would send a message. I no longer trust any of the batting statistics of the last ten years or so. None of them.
Pawnking: very well said. Baseball will withstand this latest debacle.
Whilst I have no doubt baseball will indeed withstand the scandal on drugs as a game, it will be interesting to see how carefully we all look at stats from now on. A hardline on performance enhancers (me, I'm all for a one year ban for a postive test, and a lifetime ban for a repeat offence, with sensible appeal procedures) will keep cheats to a minimum, but we know it's never going to go away. The drugs change and then the sport tries to keep up with it.
Baseball's ability to throw up natural spikes in a player's career confuse things, so we'll always be asking the question - was it real or enhanced? The only way to keep on top of those doubts and respect a player for elevating their game (however briefly) is a transparent and dynamic anti-doping policy. (But as any cycling fan will tell you, that's still not enough.)
At least in the two years that we've had a drugs policy, Selig has had the sense to recognise it needs to evolve. Both players and owners will have to recognise that this is not something that can be changed every couple of years - we need to be working regularly with WADA and the other sporting bodies who test regularly for performance enhancers to swap information. Again, it will be interesting to see whether drug testing's dynamic nature will be recognised in the next labour agreement.
I have now heard or read several well-known baseball commentators (Kurkjian, Gammons etc.) say that if Bonds resorted to persistent, wholesale use of steroids because he was jealous of McGwire and Sosa he would lose not only their respect but potentially their HOF votes. These guys don't get it. Motive isn't the issue here. If the allegations prove true, they describe a guy who cheated for years. That is the only issue that matters here; not jealousy, vanity or anything else.
I'm loath to sympathise with these guys, but I guess if there's not a culture of accepting that champions might cheat to be even better, it's a tough concept to get used to. As a result, no-one wants to say 'he's a cheat'. Look at the way the giambi story was spun - all the pathos of a guy who felt 'compelled' and none of the straight out tough questions. Everyone walked softly-softly round his 'admission' and slyly referred to it in their columns. I never got the sense that anyone stood up and directly confronted him on it.
Or to take another example - how many times has the spitballer excuse been run out to stop guys from making the hall of fame? Maybe that's why they're focussing on motive. it gives them a reason to ban the guy, instead of just saying - 'you cheated, you're not in.'
I agree with you Tom - folk are missing the point hugely. Everyone needs to get their heads right on this, recognise the problem doesn't just have a present, but a past - writ large in the stats of the 1990s.
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