As a kid you ask your parents on a long, arduous ride: “Are we there yet?” Well, this baseball steroids thing is a long arduous ride, and since baseball is supposed to make you feel like a kid, I’m asking “Are we there yet”? Every week there’s a new player that we look up to who is found to be juicing.
The homerun king – Barry Bonds – juiced (albeit allegedly)
The homerun king heir apparent – Alex Rodriguez – juiced
One of the best pitchers ever – Roger Clemens – juiced
Guys you loved to watch play – Mark McGwire, Jose Canseco, Sammy Sosa(?), Rafael Palmiero – juiced
Widely regarded as the best pure right-handed hitter in the last 50 years – Manny Ramirez – juiced
By the way, if you want a history with all the sordid details, from the Mitchell report to the new book about A-Rod, this site does a phenomenal job of it.
It’s getting to the point where you have to question everything and everybody. Sure, the vast majority of players don’t take performance enhancing drugs, but enough of the “good” ones do that the line between good performance and good performance-enhancers is so blurred right now, we can’t tell if we’re enjoying the game anymore or these guys’ physicians.
We root for players (in addition to our teams) beacuse they have a good story. We get behind them, we root for them. Sometimes, when they’re doing something remarkable, we tune in just because we want to witness history (see: the McGwire/Sosa single season home run record race, which may or may not have saved baseball after the 1994 strike). And then we witness history, and we tell our friends about it… then 31 months later, we find out the whole thing was tainted because the stories we fell in love with were missing a key ingredient: the juice. Remember Floyd Landis, anyone?
At this point, would anybody be surprised if Michael Phelps were shown to have been juicing?
