“Surely”? *Surely *you have something to back this up. We have 50+ years of amphetamine history and probably about 15-20 years of steroid use - there’s got to be at least *something *you can base this on that isn’t conjecture, rumor or bullshit, right?
Ah - “stuff”. And “pure”. How quaint.
Okay lets say we do this. Do we keep the doubles or are they gone too? How bout the really long flyouts? Do we remove every home-run of everyone who failed a drug test? Marlon Byrd is currently not hitting hr for the Mets? Actually since Bonds never failed a drug test, should we just remove hrs of everyone who has been suspected of steroid use? Bye bye Neifi Perez’s bombs? What do we do to the pitchers stats? Just pretend they got outs? How bout if the pitcher used steroids too? Do those hrs count? But the stats for the players who refused to play against blacks are good right? And the ones of players who threw spitballs and corked bats are alright too, since that is good old-fashioned baseball?
Ah there is your problem. Thinking baseball was ever pure.
Putting aside the fact that amphetamines are not like 2 cups of coffee, the argument is silly. Cheating is okay as long at it isn’t that effective? So if Braun comes back clean and hits just as many hrs that is okay since steroids didn’t do anything for him?
No, “greenies” are less bad because most people are regular coffee drinkers. Hardly anyone uses anabolic steroids.
The penalties are laid out in the collective bargaining agreement between the owners and the players. As it is baseball is arguably exceeding the penalty everybody agreed to. Perhaps the penalties will be made even harsher next time.
Many people say lots of stuff. I’d rather agree on a rational basis for making those kinds of calls.
They’re different things, sure- but they’re both against the rules and how can you prove that one is a bigger deal than the other? Baseball season is a grind and pitchers are dominating hitters these days. That may have more to do with the ban on amphetamines than the PED ban.
That’s what it is. Regardless, baseball does not write the record books. Please stare at that until it sinks in. Baseball does not “declare” a home run champion. They don’t have the authority to kick people out of the record books. When Ford Frick suggested the writers of record books devalue Roger Maris’ home run record with an asterisk, everybody ignored him.
Since when? There’s more cheating in the history of baseball than in any other sport, and until steroids, it was treated as a quaint historical relic instead of a moral offense. And Ty Cobb is arguably the worst human being in the history of sports (non-murderer division).
I think the players union would like to have a word with you about that.
The history of baseball is full of cheaters, drunks, drug addicts, racists, gamblers, monopolists, liars, and let’s not forget guys with another girlfriend in every city. It’s as corrupt as every other high-pressured human endeavor if not moreso. I’m all for bringing the hammer down on the liars and cheaters, but let’s not be naive about it.
Here’s the real reason I am opposed to changing the record books: yes, it’s true that we really don’t know who’s clean. We only know who got caught. The bigger issue to me is that MLB was much more aware of this steroid thing in the '90s than they like to pretend now. Not everyone knew everything about every player, but teams were well aware that a lot of players were juicing and they would talk about it amongst themselves at times. It was widely known that this was something some players did. If you read the Mitchell Report, for example, you can find things like this:
They were right, by the way.
So I am not interested in letting them pretend a decade later that they were shocked, shocked the McGwires and Bondses and Sosas were using steroids and HGH. I’m glad they’ve cracked down on this stuff, but I do not want to rewrite history for them. Baseball knew players were using drugs in violation of their own written rules. They didn’t care until the public cared.
This is an absolutely absurd argument. I have to think that people that make such arguments do so because they’re afraid to admit that if amphetamines had a measureable affect, and they’re on record as having TEH RAEG over PEDs, then they now have to translate that rage to guys like Mike Schmidt, Hank Aaron and Willie Mays.
I simply enjoy all the self-righteous indignation from all the fans who knew about steroids for many years, made jokes about it, cheered for players who obviously ate bowls of it for breakfast, loved watching the McGwire-Sosa home run chase for just one of many examples …
In short, they *loved *the game that PED’s made possible. They wanted it to be that way. Only when Canseco rubbed everyone’s face in it did we start hearing any serious objections, much less all this moralizing and condemnation.
So come off it, people. Either you knew it all along and *wanted *it that way, in which case you’re being a hypocritical jerkoff now, or you didn’t know about it and are therefore too stupid to breathe unassisted. Either way, y’all oughta just shut the fuck up, kthxbai.
A couple of points:
I know that players in baseball aren’t pure. They are human beings. Of the thousands of men who have played, there have been drunks, adulterers, racists, etc. That doesn’t affect the play of the game on the field. Keep your personal issues on the down low and everything is fine. But the sport and what it embodies should remain pure. Landis banned all of the Black Sox for life, even the ones who didn’t get paid and didn’t throw the games. Pete Rose, for God’s sake, was banned for simply betting on his own team. Using illicit drugs that helps your team and then engaged in felonious cover up of the investigation isn’t worse than that?
I understand that no matter what MLB does, I can print a book saying that Bonds is the HR champion, or that Aaron or Maris is. It doesn’t affect the powerful statement that MLB will not recognize these records because of cheating. Who’s the guy this year that was chasing Maris and stated he believed that Maris’ record was the real one? He would sure like Bud Selig to agree with him. How far do we take that? As far as necessary, but stripping Bonds, McGwire, and Sosa would be an excellent start.
I don’t care if MLB was complicit in steroid use in the 90s. It’s never too late to do the right thing.
I watched the McGwire-Sosa race chasing Maris with excitement. I must be one of the stupid ones, because even though I had no independent knowledge, I thought that they tested these guys for drugs. How did Steve Howe get busted 7 times back in the 80s without testing? It even came out during the chase that McGwire was using a legal over the counter supplement that was banned in other sports but legal in baseball. I believed the story that these modern athletes submitted to a rigorous training program to build strength. Why not? You are making millions per year to play a kids game. I would be hitting the gym every day. The difference between my millions and working at Wal-Mart is how well I stay in shape. Call me stupid for believing it, but I did.
Doesn’t the “best interests” power of Selig trump the union’s CBA? Plus, why in the hell do millionaires need a union? It’s not like they are powerless. They have agents who can negotiate individual contracts on their behalf. They aren’t assembly line workers.
Without the union, they’d not be millionaires. MLB management has a long history of screwing over the players. And before the union, they were pretty powerless.
I think this is misleading.
Besides for the fact that you need to distinguish between the owners and management of individual teams and baseball as a whole, the more important point is that the players union was adamantly against any sort of crackdown on steroids at that time. And the baseball players union is the most powerful union in all of sports. And the owners had bigger issues between them and the players than just steroids.
AFAICT, the only reason to outlaw steroids is the health of the players. And if the players union, elected by the players to represent themselves, refused absolutely to allow testing, then there’s no reason that the owners should have had to make huge sacrifices in negotations, to pay off the players for the privilege of protecting them.
I think if you insist on believing that, you can do so. But there’s nothing intrinsically pure about baseball or any other game, and it doesn’t make sense to make rules based on the idea that it is. It’s a myth. Of course it’s a myth that baseball has happily taken advantage of, but it’s still a myth. As a matter of fact your post gives plenty of examples of baseball’s impurity, and what’s pure about the idea of insisting it doesn’t matter if a guy is a horrendous racist or beats his wife if he hits a baseball well? That’s not just a “personal issue.”
Do you think the players would have let that stand if there had been a real union?
It’s a question of the rules, not just better or worse. And Rose wasn’t banned for “simply” betting on his own team. He was banned for gambling on baseball and lying about it. His story is that he bet only on his team, but we don’t know if that’s really true. We don’t know if Alex Rodriguez “engaged in a felonious coverup.” That’s for the government to decide, not baseball.
There is no recognizing. I suppose it’s fitting that you are not recognizing this fact.
Telling the truth is part of doing the the right thing. If MLB rewrites history to excuse itself and put all the blame on the players, that’s not truthful.
No, the CBA give him that power. The union can still contest that suspension, and he obviously understood that the union would be opposed to him using that power in this situation and decided it wasn’t worth the fight- or that he wouldn’t win. I bet the next CBA will include harsher penalties for PED use, and that should be good.
To negotiate with the billionaires who write their paychecks. That’s how they got to be millionaires in the first place, as Yookeroo said. Do you think the MLB owners just volunteered to give the players more money? They had few rights, formed a union, won free agency in court, and as baseball’s revenues have increased astronomically, their pay went up- despite some collusion by the team owners, of course.
They’re basically the same thing. The league is run by the owners collectively. That’s who the commissioner works for. And I would argue that anyway there was plenty of collective guilt here. I don’t think anybody fielded a team of no-steroid all-stars.
There was no attempt at a crackdown on steroids until pretty late in the game. When there was, yes, the union opposed it for a time.
Which is another way of saying what I said earlier: they didn’t care about steroids until the public did. The money was more important.
But the management of individual teams probably had more knowledge of their own team than they did of the league as a whole.
You need to be more specific about which time periods you are referring to.
By that criteria you could say “the money was more important” about anybody, about any issue. Especially people you don’t like …
Probably. But executives and scouts move from team to team and I imagine a lot of them talk shop anyway. It’s not as if there is no contact between organizations.
As I recall, the first testing program was planned in 2002 or 2003. It was very weak, partly because the union wasn’t supportive, and was made stronger in 2005. That’s a long time after the home run record chase.
Whether I like them or not isn’t relevant. Dealing with the steroid and PED situation was not a high priority for anyone until the public started to get worked up about it. I think it makes sense to conclude that there was more awareness of the situation inside baseball than outside.
But there are differences of degree.
If the union wasn’t supportive in 2002/2003, they probably weren’t more supportive earlier. Do you know that there were no attempts to deal with it before 2002?
In addition, while knowlege within baseball was undoubtedly more widespread than knowlege outside of it, it’s revisionist to present it as if everyone knew the full extent of what was going on at the time.
Consider the fact that the union negotiated a deal under which a stricter regimen would kick in if 5% of players failed tests. We know now that more than 5% failed, but the union, in negotiating the deal, obviously thought there was a good chance that fewer than 5% would fail.
Whether you like them is very relevant. Because everything has a price, and there’s a limit to how much any given person would pay for everything. So you can characterize anyone as caring more about money than any Issue X for selected values of money and X. Whether you choose to do so depends a lot on whether you like the person.
In this case, I’ve observed that the entire purpose of steroid testing is to protect the players and the players’ elected representatives were opposed to it on their behalf. If I was the owners it would not take a lot more than that for me to drop the issue. I don’t see that I should be required to pay someone to protect them. Calling that attitude “money was more important” is misleading, IMO. YMMV.
I’m not aware of any. It didn’t become a major issue until 1998 and afterward, and I think 2002 may have been the first new CBA after that point.
We don’t need to argue about the full extent. There was plenty of general awareness that it was happening.
I’m not sure I believe that. In hindsight it’s sort of amazing that the union was able to negotiate a no-penalties round of testing and a possible free pass for everyone if that many players had failed.
The purpose of steroid testing is to allow the players and owners to keep making money. After a period of ignoring it and overlooking the issue, they concluded that it was better for business if they tested and tried to make sure they had a clean product than if they didn’t.
then what was your point with this?
The only reason playing with steroids is not a “clean product” is because it’s against the rules/law. And the only reason this is so is because it’s harmful to the health of people who take them.
It was against the rules and the law before 2003, but the rules were not enforced and nobody on any side seemed to care very much. And of course the first set of rules were very weak. Some people feel they’re still too weak. Things changed when there was public pressure and public interest.
That doesn’t relate to the point we’re discussing.
They were against the rules and law because of concerns about players’ health.
In other words you’re determined to argue some other point that isn’t really relevant to the one I was discussing. Ok then.
There are a number of items on the banned substances list that are neither illegal nor harmful. What about those?
This has consistently been my point since my first post on the subject (#109). I’m not forcing you to argue it.
I don’t know what you’re referring to, but if they’re not illegal or harmful then they’re presumably not related to the steroids issue. Perhaps you can clarify.