Spare me the holier-than-thou foreground noise coming out of Arlington, TX, Boston, MA, New York, NY, and points N, S, E and W. A-Rod cheated!!?? What will be revealed next?
It is reasonable to conclude the majority of major league ballplayers who dreamed of hitting home runs or throwing the ball over 90 MPH experimented with or used PED's throughout the final decades of the last millennium or the first few years of this one. It is equally reasonable to assume the people who owned or own baseball teams and wrote about or commented on the players on these teams were equally aware of their use, condoned it or at a minimum winked and looked the other way.
So, spare me the shock and outrage. And spare me the instant polls on websites asking people without a HOF vote whether this player or that one should be denied entrance. And let's get serious about records, to wit, which years should we subtract from Barry Bonds' output? Should we now throw out all of A-Rods' records between 2000 - 2003? And how about Brady Anderson's 52-home run season? Should it be expunged? How many wins did Roger Clemens pile up while on the juice?
Of course it stinks that these guys and hundreds of others sought some advantage. The problem is how to neutralize those advantages after the fact. It cannot be done in any official way. Instead, we will have to rely on public opinion minus the posturing, which is heavily against players like Bonds, who refuse to fess up. Some have suggested reinstating Hank Aaron as the all-time home run king. In many peoples' minds he still is the legitimate title holder.
That is all we can expect.
1 comment:
Two points today about Ryan Howard.
The first one is actually more a point about batting average. In 2008, Ryan Howard hit .251. A year earlier he had hit .268. In the two years, though, he got a hit when he came to the plate at almost exactly the same rate.http://fanzak.com/fzrants/The_40_340_club
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