{"id":247,"date":"2009-02-09T20:45:03","date_gmt":"2009-02-10T01:45:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.broadstreetbelievers.com\/?p=247"},"modified":"2009-02-09T20:45:03","modified_gmt":"2009-02-10T01:45:03","slug":"a-final-word-on-steroids-in-mlb","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/broadstreetbelievers.com\/?p=247","title":{"rendered":"A Final Word on Steroids in MLB"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"arod\"So, we had yet another steroids “bombshell” hit the sports news world yesterday, when it came out that Alex Rodriguez tested positive in 2003.\u00a0 My first reaction: Great, now I have to hear about this for the next six months instead of actual baseball.\u00a0 I’m\u00a0very tired of hearing about steroids in baseball, and I’m tired of talking about it.\u00a0 What I’d like to do in this post is lay out my (pretty simple) opinion on the whole mess, and be done with it.\u00a0 Hopefully forever.<\/p>\n

I’ll leave it to others to decide what this news means for Alex Rodriguez.\u00a0 People will debate how his steroid use compares to Barry Bonds’s and Sammy Sosa’s, and where his career will ultimately rank in the history of the game when viewed through this new prism.\u00a0<\/p>\n

With the news that 104 players tested positive in 2003, it\u00a0is\u00a0clear that, while\u00a0certainly not every<\/em>\u00a0 player\u00a0has used steroids, there are literally hundreds<\/em>\u00a0 that have.\u00a0 To me, that makes it\u00a0fairly difficult to\u00a0point\u00a0at guys like Bonds and Roger Clemens, as much as\u00a0I dislike both of those men, and say, “You’re the villain.”\u00a0 I mean, they are villains, but not because they took steroids.\u00a0 If there is any villain in this mess, it’s Major League Baseball, for looking the other way for so long.\u00a0 The people running the league may\u00a0not have known the extent of the problem, but that doesn’t\u00a0excuse the fact that steroids weren’t even banned in baseball until 2004.\u00a0 As soon as high-profile questions were being asked about Mark McGwire’s “supplements” in 1998, an investigation should have been launched.<\/p>\n

All that being said, here’s where I stand on the whole thing.\u00a0 First of all, the most important thing is for MLB to\u00a0do everything it can to eradicate performance-enhancing drugs from the sport.\u00a0\u00a0Use whatever amount of insane money it takes (maybe even skim\u00a0some of that $18 mil.\/year from Selig), and get the most advanced testing system in place.\u00a0\u00a0Some people argue: “Why\u00a0not just make steroids legal instead of deluding ourselves that\u00a0the game is ‘pure’.”\u00a0 I am strongly\u00a0opposed to that stance.\u00a0 There are countless examples of the harm that these drugs\u00a0do to a person’s body in the long-term.\u00a0\u00a0Players shouldn’t feel pressured to use these\u00a0drugs\u00a0in order to compete.\u00a0\u00a0 Beyond that, so many fans have shown an outrage over steroid use, that the long-term health of the sport itself depends on convincing fans that the league has\u00a0done everything it can to prevent it.<\/p>\n

The other issue is how to assess the careers of “Steroid Era” players\u00a0and decide who belongs in the Hall of Fame.\u00a0\"mcgwireUnfortunately, I\u00a0think more investigations should be done to see who was using steroids and\u00a0who wasn’t.\u00a0 The fans\u00a0have a desire and a right to know those things.\u00a0 As for\u00a0Hall of Fame decisions, I think you can take into account steroid use.\u00a0 Obviously, it’s a very complicated\u00a0issue because you’ll rarely be completely sure if a player did or did not take\u00a0steroids, or how much it may have\u00a0helped them if they\u00a0did.\u00a0 To me, if\u00a0a player would have been\u00a0Hall of Fame-caliber without steroids, like Bonds, Clemens,\u00a0and A-Rod, then they should be in the Hall and their steroid use should be noted on their plaque and\u00a0wherever else deemed necessary.\u00a0 If, on the other hand,\u00a0the steroids most likely made them into a Hall-of-Famer, like McGwire and Sosa, then they\u00a0shouldn’t get in.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

So that’s my take, let’s move on.\u00a0 The Phils locked up Ryan Howard for 3 years and $54 million.\u00a0 It’s a good deal, the guy is a champion, after all.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So, we had yet another steroids “bombshell” hit the sports news world yesterday, when it came out that Alex Rodriguez tested positive in 2003.\u00a0 My first reaction: Great, now I have to hear about this for the next six months … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[57,449,95],"class_list":["post-247","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mlb","tag-alex-rodriguez","tag-ryan-hoard","tag-steroids"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/broadstreetbelievers.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/247","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/broadstreetbelievers.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/broadstreetbelievers.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/broadstreetbelievers.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/broadstreetbelievers.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=247"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/broadstreetbelievers.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/247\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/broadstreetbelievers.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=247"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/broadstreetbelievers.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=247"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/broadstreetbelievers.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=247"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}