Well, gosh, how many steroid tests did Mickey Mantle take? Henry Aaron had his best hime run season when he was 37. Where’s the steroid results for Mike Schmidt?
Sammy Sosa: No evidence he took steroids. When you have some, let’s see it. He shouldn’t be elected to the Hall of Fame for being a good guy, he should be elected - if he is, and I’ll grant there are arguments against him based on his record - because he hit a metric assload of home runs. If evidence comes up he took roids, I’ll reconsider my position.
You can keep saying this, but the fact remains that attendance had gone up from 1995 to 1996, had gone up from 1996 to 1997, and would have gone up anyway from 1997 to 1998.
As Justin points out, people had already parroted this bullshit line when Ripkin broke the streak. Oooh, he saved baseball, he saved baseball. Three years later, ooh, they saved baseball. For what reason I cannot understand, the media is obsessed with talking about how baseball is in trouble. It’s not, hasn’t been in our lifetimes. Baseball has been fine. It will continue to go along nicely. Major league baseball has bene played for over a hundred years and will still be being played after all the current members of the SDMB are dead.
Apparently you need a blood test for proof. Therefore McGwire and Bonds should be in the HOF. They did not give up proof either. Roger should be first ballot choice.
And I know full well you have read about the demise of baseball. It has been around for a long time. Many experts and sports writers have written the eulogy. I think baseball is by far the best game . But do enough kids play it anymore? We have had some big attendance years lately. I hope it stays.
“The death of baseball” is one of those memes that Just. Will. Not. Die. And there’s not one ounce of truth to it. Not one.
Attendance has stayed healthy over the years. Grown in most of them.
Thousands of kids are drafted by MLB teams every year. So obviously somebody is still playing baseball.
Television ratings have remained steady over the years. The only “drop” is an artificial drop due to the ratings for every television program dropping over the years.
Jay McGwire wins the award for “Worst Brother of the Decade.” He’s saying that he pushed steroids on Mark, and now he’s outing him for profit. My god, what an asshole.
It’s only black and white if you don’t care to think beyond that first “Period.” If it’s widespread and neither players nor owners nor management have made even a token effort to enforce the rules, does that not change the implications of the cheating? Why is this so much more condemnable then all the players who routinely (and more or less openly) used amphetamines – i.e. illegal performance enhancing drugs – in previous eras?
I assume you’re referring to this incident? If so, you’ve got be kidding me. World-class douchebag Rick Reilly basically handed Sosa a cup and told him to pee in it, out of the blue. Innocent or not, my first instinct would be to pummel his ass.
Not kidding at all. Reilly did great work there, challenging the posturing asshole Sosa to do what he professed he wanted, oh, so badly, to do, and which no one was preventing him from doing. If people don’t click on the link, at least read the end of that piece:
Were they ignoring it from the stands? Because attendance was steady, as I have already documented. Were they ignoring it from their living rooms? because viewership was steady, as I (and another poster - I can’t remember his name - he’s the one that linked to the World Series ratings - OH! That was you) have already documented.
Yes, and this is undisputed. But it simply did not translate to any meaningful or longstanding increase in attendance or viewership. So again I ask - HOW DID IT ‘SAVE’ BASEBALL?
True, to an extent. Like I said, I’m digging for regular season ratings numbers across MLB. When I do, do you want to place some sort of wager on their results?
When did the Yankees play LA?
Given your above argument, can you explain how the '97 WS received higher ratings than the ‘98 WS? I mean, McGwire and Sosa just finished breathing life into America’s Pasttime, the friggin’ Yankees were playing a West Coast team, and somehow ratings went down, compared to the amazing matchup of those media powerhouses Cleveland and Florida. To the casual observer, it would seem that completely destroys this argument.
Testing these guys now would be useless, right? How long would traces of these chemicals remain in the body? I always assumed that it was a quick flush- isn’t that how guys could time their cycles against a league’s stated testing schedule?
It’s one thing to be gamed by guys with an obvious and specific motive–but to ignore being gamed and want to reward these creeps for trying to get something over on you? Why would you do that? You’re not stupid, you’re not blind, you’re not looking at this from the perspective of narrow partisanship–are you?
Huh? Mine was a question strictly about the idea of testing these particular guys now (Sosa, McGwire, et al), as several posters seem to be saying. If they stopped taking the drugs years ago, a test today won’t show anything, right?
If you have a dirty test for one of them in the file drawer, whip it out. If steroids are now a bar to the HOF, then figure out a way to apply it beside rampant speculation.
I don’t hate the player, I hate the game. MLB and the players union made this happen- if you know you can improve your performance with a banned substance that we will never test you for, you will probably do it, based on the players I have known and the cutthroat business they are in.
Do I personally agree with steroid use in baseball? No, I guess not. Do I know people who have taken them to speed healing from injuries? Yep, absolutely. Are players right now, every day, trying to get an extra edge? Hell yes. Even guys who play for the joy of the game want to get paid, and want to keep playing for as long as they can.
PS- obviously, the current testing system could be better. Now, players know they will be tested for a laundry list of substances, so they attempt to find something that isn’t on the list yet.
There are marginal players who have careers due to performance enhancing drugs. It is not just the stars. Guys from all levels take them. HGH is just one drug that is undetectable right now. There are labs all over the world trying to come up with a new drug or masking agent. Sports will never be clean.
A test today would show nothing. One of the ways steroid users beat testing is “cycling” on and off the drugs over periods of a few weeks at a time. They don’t stay in your system more than a few weeks.
They’re not a bar to the Hall. At least there is no rule against admitting people who have been caught using steroids; Rafael Palmeiro will be eligible in a few years. It’s just that the voters so far refuse to elect anyone who obviously did them. I don’t think it’s mere “speculation.” In some cases it’s very obvious.
I agree completely. It doesn’t absolve the players who did wrong, but baseball was more than happy to market and benefit from players who were juicing.
You’re right, in that MLB for example doesn’t WANT to be clean as much as it wants that appearance. So the message we need to send to players is “Yeah, you may get away with taking performance enhacing drugs. We’re not going to make our lives about investigating every player whom we suspect, but what we will do is NOT to reward those players we suspect, but lack the hard evidence against, like Sosa and McGwire. If you want a clean reputation, all you need do is play clean, test voluntarily, tell on every player you have seen using enhancing drugs, force your union to stop protecting guys who use, and assure us that you have performed without drugs. Everyone else: you get to live under a cloud of suspicion, and your post-career rewards will reflect that cloud.”
Of course baseball will never fully get rid of steroids. No sport will ever get rid of steroids whether they “want” to or not. That is no reason to treat all players like criminals. You do your best to educate (something that all sports have done a terrible job of) and test players, but there are going to be guys who slip through the cracks. It is better to miss a few, then punish players without evidence. If I’m in the baseball union I’d argue strongly against invasions of privacy without cause.
A good agent ,with a clean player could make a big deal out of a public test at the leagues favorite lab. That would remove the stain from him and pressure other players to do the same.
I don’t get why everybody is assuming that the brother’s claim is true.
Obscure relative of a celebrity - what’s to say he’s not just lying/sensationalizing for attention? If it’s just one man’s word vs another’s, what’s he have to lose?
And if he had a video of Mark shooting a needle up his butt, what’s to say there were steroids in the syringe? Or that the video wasn’t faked? Of that the experts who testified that it was a genuine tape of a man shooting steroids weren’t bribed?
My point is, you believe what you want to believe, the preponderance of evidence aside.
Therefore there is no proof that they were clean. So McGwire, Bonds and others should be banned forever from the Hall of Fame, and Roger should never have his name mentioned in connection wiht the HoF.
