OK, I’ve got five bucks that says Craig Counsell and his 35 career homers did not test positive for steroids in 2003.
But beyond him, all bets are off.
That’s the true shame about baseball’s never-ending steroid scandal. It’s turned the sport into a bad “X-Files” refrain: Trust no one.
You half-expect players to swap their caps and jerseys for fedoras and trench coats. Whodunnit? Who knows? A pitching coach friend of mine says he’ll stand behind Greg Maddux and Jamie Moyer on body type alone, and I hope he’s right. But a few years ago, you’d have put Andy Pettitte in the same group, and we all saw how that turned out.
And now, thanks to Sports Illustrated’s weekend blockbuster, A-Rod has officially become A-Roid. On Monday, we got confirmation – not just speculation, but a full admission – that baseball’s best hitter did steroids from 2001 to 2003. That’s 156 home runs and 395 RBIs worth of taint.
Why should we care? Why isn’t Rodriguez just another juicer? Because he was supposed to be the clean slugger. When Barry Bonds completed his insurgency against Hank Aaron (long live the Home Run King), Rodriguez was the guy who made many baseball fans feel better. Yeah, maybe Bonds cheated his way to the homer crown, they figured, but Rodriguez was going to win it back. And do so legitimately.
So much for that theory. Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio? A nation turns its lonely eyes to you. And that same nation wonders who the next great hope is. Albert Pujols seems the likeliest, given the active home run chart. Unless, of course, he’s got a test floating around. Again, who knows?
For now, all that’s certain is Rodriguez’s place in the ever-growing Hall of Shame. Put his bust right there next to Bonds, Roger Clemens, Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa, Rafael Palmeiro, etc., etc., etc.
He cheated his way to greatness. We trusted him, and like too many others, he betrayed that trust. And if he did it, then anybody can.
Trust no one.
Except Craig Counsell.
Honesty. What a policy!
At least Rodriguez was a man and admitted it, which is half the battle for redeeming his reputation. Too often, players have failed to take Richard Nixon’s great lesson to heart: It’s not the crime that gets you, it’s the cover-up. If you screwed up, admit you screwed up, and people will eventually move on. But if you keep insisting on playing some shell game, you’ll keep getting shelled. Just ask Bonds and Clemens.
“The more honest we can all be, the quicker we can get baseball [back] to where it needs to be,” Rodriguez told ESPN’s Peter Gammons.
Amen to that.
Curt Schilling is on the honesty bandwagon, too. He’s that rare post-1990s commodity, a strikeout pitcher who was presumably clean. And why should we think he’s clean? Because he wants everybody in that 2003 test named. Not necessarily to bring more shame to them, but to exonerate all the players who didn’t test positive.
Sports Illustrated says 104 players tested positive for performance-enhancing drugs in 2003. That means 646 players did not. But those guys and every other baseball player remain guilty by association. Worse yet, the union goes to extraordinary lengths to protect the steroid abusers, epitomized by allegations that top union officials tipped off players to pending steroids tests.
The lack of outrage from the innocent players continues to amaze me, because they’re among the groups that were most wronged by steroids users.
The steroids guys have cheated a lot of people, but here’s who got cheated the most.
1) The clean big-leaguers who competed against them at an unfair disadvantage. (Talk about some patient people. Will they ever light up a union meeting with indignant fire and brimstone?)
2) The clean guys, both big-leaguers and minor-leaguers, who lost roster spots to the dirty guys. (Imagine being the Triple-A player who stayed clean and never made it to the big leagues, but saw known users pass him on the ladder. What do the steroids apologists say to him?)
3) The players from previous eras, whose records and legacies have been raided by ’roiders. (Aaron has never looked better, both as a player and a person.)
4) The fans who believed what they saw was legit, but now wonder when they’ll be able to believe so again.
5) The younger kids who are harming their bodies because they think the path to sporting success is paved with steroids.
I keep hearing baseball people say that they want to put the steroid era behind them. But there’s only one way to do so: Stop protecting the cheats at the expense of their victims.
Hard to say you’re sorry
While he deserves credit for saying he’s sorry, Rodriguez still needs to work at it.
Check out Rodriguez’s entire interview with Gammons. You’ll see he spends almost as much time attacking the people who outed him (Jose Canseco, Sports Illustrated’s Selena Roberts) as he did asking for forgiveness.
My favorite statement from Rodriguez on Canseco: “And, you know, it’s kind of interesting how “SportsCenter” and ESPN still quote this guy.”
Why wouldn’t they keep quoting Canseco? Everything he says turns out to be true.
Lil’ Bud?
At least nobody’s talking about Bud Selig’s salary anymore, right?
Even though Commissioner Selig has done wonders for baseball’s bottom line, we predicted last week that he’d take some heat for his $18 million salary.
We just didn’t think the heat would include out-of-line comparisons to a pimp.
Yeah, ESPN’s Scott Van Pelt went there, as well as a few other unwise places, on his radio show last week. It was enough to get Van Pelt suspended from his radio show, though he did reach out to Selig in an apologetic phone call.
And to prove the apology was genuine, Van Pelt sent Selig a gift copy of “Flavor of Love.”
OK, not really. But don’t you think Selig would love the joke?
And with the A-Roid thing, he could probably use the laugh.
Tune in every Tuesday morning during the 6 o’clock hour when I join Doug Russell and Mike Wickett on SportsRadio 1250 AM for Tuesdays with Howie. You can also find the segments in their Audio Vault. And don’t forget to check out our new fitness column, Training with Tim.
