A-Rod Admits Steroid Use

I give credit to him for admitting it. However, he loses 2 credit for 2 things.

#1, he had the chance on 60 Minutes to come clean and he lied.

#2,

I don't believe that for a second.

 

Its a shame that baseball has gotten the way it is. It seems like every sport these days go through its darkest moments. Boxing has had its shady moments (as relating to people taking dives). Wrestling (while not a sport) has had numerous problems with steroid use. Now its baseball. What's next? Basketball & Football?

 

I grew up about 15 minutes from the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown. I have a suggestion for the Hall. They need to add a Hall for all the juiced players who set questionable records and otherwise made shambles of our American pastime. They can call it The Asterisk Hall. It will be for the likes of the all the so-called superstars who have been or will be found to be steroid users...

I'm disgusted with the lot of them.

 

Sad story all the way around.

Question: what was was the reason for the the ESPN reporter breaking the story on what happened so long ago?? Just wondering.

 

Next? Both the NFL and the NBA have had their share of dark times recently.

Selena Roberts isn't an ESPN reporter, she works for Sports Illustrated. The story was broken because the feds figured out which baseball players underwent "anonymous" testing in 2003. It won't be long before the rest of the names are released who've done steroids. Those guys better get working on their stories and their acting performances.

 

This was a watershed moment in baseball history. I think once the the other 103 names that tested positive in 2003 (remember, these were the dumb or arrogant ones who didn't cycle off since they knew the tests were coming) become public it will finalize the paradigm shift that is taking place. It will be shown that probably 75% of the players in the era from about '87 - '04 were tainted to some degree. The result will be some kind of footnote or asterisk in the record book and Hall of Fame, which will pave the way for guys like A-Rod, Bonds and Clemens making the Hall with an asterisk.

And don't get me started on football - probably 90% of the players are on HGH which can't be detected through tests. The players have become so big and fast that it's ridiculous. There's going to come a time where a player is killed on the field from taking a hit, and then maybe the NFL (and the rest of us) will wake up. Of course, as long as we keep making these guys millionaires through our support, they will be using all means to get that advantage, so I am guilty in this too.

 

Yes, correction noted. Point being that anonymous testing should stay anonymous. Hence the term "anonymous."

 

Yeah, I love how the journalists are so concerned about keeping their sources anonymous while digging up dirt from anonymous testing.

 

1987 is exactly the year we started seeing effects of steroids. I followed baseball very closely when I was in junior high and high school in the 80s. I distinctly remember reading articles in 1987 about why we were seeing such a surge in home runs. I also remember Whitey Herzog speculating that the ball was the reason, that the ball was wound tighter and was "juiced" as a result. I remember thinking that was a silly reason, but it turns out that the ball wasn't juiced, the players were. Looking back, I wonder how we were so naive.

 

Maybe it's because folks used to think a lot of ball players. They were role models and, even if only in our imagination, someone to emulate. My brother would pretend he was Ron Hunt. I got to be Nolan Ryan. I'd throw as hard as I could and Ron Hunt would take another hit-by-the-pitch.... Okay, we weren't the sharpest tools in the shed... These guys represented what we thought was -well, in its most literal sense - making the Big Leagues! They got to do what we loved for a living. All the sights and sounds that made up our endless summers was their workplace.


Boots Day was a hometown hero to us. He was signed by the Cards in 1969 and ended up with the Expos. We went to Parc Jarry three years in a row to watch Boots play on "Boots Day Day". His mother and my father went to school together so we got to know Boots pretty well. It is pretty amazing, when you're 8 years old, to sit at the same table and eat pancakes with a pro ball player!

No multi-million dollar contracts, no multi-million dollar ego, no rippling biceps (Boots was 5'9" 160 lbs) - just a simple country boy who loved baseball. I could look up to that. I think if you really love baseball, with all its sights, sounds and smells, it is hard to imagine that those players have the same frailties and vulnerabilities as the rest of us. We want our heroes to be bigger than that.

 

I wonder if A-Rod told ALL of the truth. It's kind of like when I was in high school before Christ changed my life. I would tell me mom I was going to a party, but that I was going to be the designated driver. In all actuality I was going to be as drunk as anyone at the place. I told enough of the truth to make myself look honest. Peter Gammons didn't exactly "grill" him with tough follow up questions. He could have taken steroids while playing for the Mariners and also the Yankees.

 

I honestly think I'm about done with baseball. I can't handle it - the best player in the sport caught cheating? Not to mention the other superstars already caught .. what a joke.

 

1987 is thrown around a lot, but there's nothing definitive. Studies have also placed the date later, in the early 90s, none later than 1995 when baseball was trying to recover from the debacle of 1994's strike and loss of the WS. Makes sense, since the Union, owners, and league itself had something to lose and more to gain by looking the other way.

Andy, as usual, makes some interesting points:

Dunno about watershed, because I believe the Mitchell report was that moment. But this is the beginning of the end of THAT moment. The final dominoes are starting to fall.

How so?

Interesting theory. However, I fail to see how this is practical. Do you have a Tainted Hall of Fame, a seperate wing? Two record books? People threw this out when Roger Maris was breaking Babe's record because of the expanded season. Records are records, and the Hall (which is already tainted) is the Hall.

I'm playing Devil's Advocate somewhat here, FTR.

Correct on all counts. That said, you know Canton has players that are tainted and juiced. Will Cooperstown become Canton? More to the point, should it?

This leads to another question....and more devil's advocate..........are we overreacting? Performance enhancers have been around for an indeterminant amount of time, and performance influencing substances have been around for all of baseball (stoned/drunk pitchers and hitters "inflating" statistics of others on their way to records and the HOF).

Every era has had some monniker attached. Or put another way, we've had many eras. Juiced ball. Dead ball. Dead arms. Live arms. Dead bat. Expansion. Pre-Negro. And the further away we've gotten from these, the less these have influenced opinion to an extent. Will that be the way this era looks? More to the point, should it be?

 

I should've started a new thread, perhaps, but CCRob's prescient comments were a bit ahead of me from another thread:

I have a reply to this that I'll give a bit later. It involves Pete, Bill James, Keith Olbermann, and a cast of thousands. :laugh:

 

Speaking of the Hall of Fame.... Doubleday Field, former home of the HoF Game, is right in the middle of Cooperstown. On Saturdays, there are a handful of over forties that get together to play baseball. Most of the teams wear period uniforms (and about half of them wear some sort of brace on the knee or ankle).:laugh: For about $3 you can get a hotdog and a Pepsi from the little shop outside the field behind the first base line.

Wood bats, no inflated egos, Advil and Ben-Gay are the harshest substances to be found. 17 guys laughed at the one feller who came up about a foot short on his slide into second. The same 17 guys cheered on a well over 40 who hit the ball long but got thrown out from center as he hobbled toward first like Kurt Gibson.

I must be getting old. I can choose to spend a Saturday at Doubleday watching scrub baseball or tune into the YES Network and watch multi-millionaires.... hmmm... I'll be at Doubleday, first base side...

 

Football is different than baseball when it comes to performance-enhancing drugs. Football fans have come to expect it, almost demand it, for the desire to see faster and bigger players; to witness even greater bone-crunching hits. Baseball fans will never tolerate drugs, because the nature of the game is different - it is more about precision and grace. Baseball was always the sport that the everyman could play. Too short? Can't play basketball normally. Too little, can't play football normally. But baseball is different. It is still the quintessential American game.