Forgive the slight hijack, but what do you guys think of the several players who, in the wake of being named in the Mitchell Report, confessed to taking steroids or HGH once…in 1960…for 20 minutes? Is it a phony, damage control-oriented confession?
I think in it’s probably true in some cases and damage control in others. But the players have figured out that the “I was just trying to get healthy” is a more acceptable excuse, which makes it a little less trustworthy.
That’s not true. He’d basically have to prove that Mitchell acted with malice or disregard for whether the accusations were true or not. It’s still very hard to prove, though, and I don’t think he’d even try.
Personally, if legit, I think “I did it to get back on the field” is a fair excuse. The team is paying you big bucks to be on the field- one could easily get injured and say fuck it, I’m done for the year, go back home and sit on your ass and collect your salary. But the team pays you to be on the field, the fans expect you out there, your teammates do as well, so I can’t fault a person for trying to minimize the recovery time of an injury.
Of course it’s damage control. Pettite comes out and says that yes, the ONE time I took HGH is, coincidentally, the ONE time that the ONE guy the feds got to roll over knew about. He is quite literally confessing to the very minimum.
Even the guy that most people thought was unfairly dinged by the report, Brian Roberts, has admitted that he did what he was accused of. Of course, he claims he did it only that ONE time and then he realized it “wasn’t what he was about” or some nonsense.
Except, of course, for the fact that it was (most likely) illegal and (depending on the time frame and drug in question) against the rules of the sport.
The catch here is that Clemens probably wasn’t using PEDs in 2007 and even attempted to preemptively explain away his expected decline by claiming he got is rejuvenation from Vioxx (which had been recalled). My conclusion is that he doubted he could keep up his level of performance without chemical help and came up with a plausible and legal excuse for why his level would drop.
Because Bonds is an EXTREMELY unusual case. 99.99% of the time, fans are pushovers who WANT to make excuses for players. Ask Pete Rose.
Barry Bonds is “crucified” only because he has a well-deserved reputation for being a surly prick. If he were seen as a nice guy (even if that nice guy image was completely phony, as in the case of Kirby Puckett), fans would quickly forgive and forget.
Heck, in San Francisco, fans forgave and forgot and gave Bonds a blanket pardon for ALL his crimes ages ago.
Andy Pettitte is seen as a nice guy. I’m inclined to think fans will not only forgive him, they’ll give him a standing ovation in the Bronx if he ever starts for the Yankees again.
Probably true. I do think he is certainly smart enough to have stopped using steroids after they were banned. But regardless of what he may have done last year, I think it was his final season. He was not effective or durable, and proved a slightly better alternative than Kei Igawa. I didn’t see him trying for another year of that.
It has always been a simple thing for the innocent to clear up. Give a vial of blood and test it. Then ask to broadcast the results to every paper and TV channel. Problem solved.
It is expensive to test everyone and baseball will not do it. But everyone clean can afford a test of their own. If a few of them went public with a neutral lab report ,the others would feel pressure to do the same .
This is the key point, and the most damning part of the Mitchell report. If MLB wanted to be clean, it could. If a team wanted all of its players to be clean, it could. If an individual player wanted to be clean, he could.
The problem is that each person or group of people has strong incentives to cheat and/or look the other way. The player to get healthy or make the majors or get a new contract, the team to get more wins and thus more fans, and the league as a whole to generate record chases and excitement. Individual players are actually prevented from doing ad hoc self-testing by their collective bargaining agreement, I believe.
The only lasting solution is a sports culture in which PED use is not tolerated. MLB clearly doesn’t have this - Tejada was just traded for, Clemens is widely defended, Bonds will most likely sign somewhere and play until he goes to prison. Until teams start routinely investigating their own players and letting PED users go, they will be used. The incentives are just too large.
Is he? Maybe. But that doesn’t mean that other players weren’t discouraged by the treatment he got. I know I’d be reluctant after seeing how he got treated.
The team is paying big bucks to a player to play as good as he possible can. The fans expect the same. Do you fault him for using drugs to improve his performance?
If I were a player I would probably use HGH. Steroids is easy to check for now.
However a lot of long time steroid users claim no ill effects. We may be overplaying it.
http://www.villagevoice.com/news/0751,gardiner,78667,2.html Just read this story on police and drugs. I can not say I am shocked. But it could be growing outside sports.
I may have to put aside my hatred for Curt Schilling, as Curt has posted on his blog that Clemens should prove he has never used or give up his Cy Young awards- love it!
Yookeroo, I make a tiny distinction between a drug that supposedly only helps you heal from injury faster vs. one that can make you an entirely different, better player.
Please, don’t look at future seasons and conclude that players are suddenly drug free, and giving all of us – who question their drug use – the finger, by performing well in the ‘post drug’ era. Bullshit – we won’t have a ‘post drug’ era – not yet anyway.
Let’s not be naive about the testing programs in place, and the ability to detect certain drugs. The drug of choice, HGH, is essentially un-detectable. There are other drugs that have challenges, too.
Alot of this is nonsense to people ‘in the know’: people who have trained others and been around these substances…well, alot of this nonsense from Clemens and Bonds is just laughable to people like me. They can deny all they want, and they can point to drug tests and whatever – it’s all a joke.
Look, say you grew up smoking pot, and your kids start coming home, high and showing the signs that you know are from marijuana…are you gonna insist on a drug test, or are you going to conclude, ‘my kid has been smoking pot’?
Roger Clemens, spare me the bullshit. You are the 16 y/o kid coming home high on marijuana to parents who smoked it everyday when they were teens. Go to your fucking room, Roger.
linky
He is still saying he didn’t use drugs to enhance his performance. He took a couple of injections of HGH while on the disabled list. He hoped it would help him recover faster. I doubt it did. A couple of injections months before you can pitch again is not going to enhance your performance. Nothing in the report says that is a lie.
There is one big problem I have with the Mitchell Report. There is no level of proof needed to be named in it. For some there is a paper trail and lots of evidence. For others there is the testimony of shady characters and nothing else. I am willing to think that there may be some mistakes. Why not Clemens? There is no proof, just some guy who was trying to weasel out of federal charges. (“Common give us one big name”)
Despite what the OP says not “everyone named in the steroid report” has come out and admitted using. For one David Justice stated that he was offered HGH but never used it. He said that he did not know much about it at the time and probably would have taken it if it was in a pill but he balked when he found out it was in a needle. There may be others who deny it but they have not been covered around here. Hell most of those named no one cares about anyway so they could have a press conference and no one would show up.
I was disappointed in the Mitchell Report. Not with what is actually the important part, the recommendations for the future. With the part everyone talks about, the names. He took twenty months to put this together. Almost all of the information about players came from two trainers and from BALCO. All products of ongoing investigations by law enforcement. He took twenty months and basically dug up nothing on his own. He certainly didn’t look too hard at the Red Sox.
I also don’t see the problem with using steroids legally to come back from an injury. If my grandmother can get them (and should get them) to help heal from breaking her elbow why can’t an athelete? It should be controlled and prescribed by league regulated doctors and not dentists but I don’t see a problem with that. Taking steroids short term during a recovery process will not give you an unfair advantage when you return. Steroids just don’t work that way.
- Do you have proof that they are “entirely different”?
- Why the distinction?
How does a person go about proving that he has never used steroids? Can you prove it?
No I don’t, I’m going on what has been reported about the two, that HGH will help you recover from injury faster but not make you better/stronger like steriods. If this is incorrect, then I retract my statement.
jtgain, you are right, of course you can’t, I just love that Schilling is calling him out, but of course you can’t provde you didn’t do something. But he can address the specific claims made against him and possbily refute them in some manner (he said he shot me up in Toronto on Jan 12, here’s proof I was in Fiji that day, etc.).
I’d love to see Schilling, who will be 42 next season, prove that he’s never used anything himself.