Take Me Out of the Ballgame
Jason Grimsley's revelations to federal investigators do not surprise me. Not one bit.
They sadden me. They disgust me. But they do not surprise me.
A lot of baseball experts would have you believe baseball is on its way out of the so-called "Steroid Era," on its way to getting those nasty drugs out of the game and on its way back to integrity and respectability.
As soon as Barry Bonds retires.
But, as I long suspected, this drug scandal goes much, much deeper than Bonds. Bonds might be the biggest name in all this--two books written about him over the past few months and his historic chase of Babe Ruth and Hank Aaron--but he is far from the only one allegedly guilty of juicing.
We now know it wasn't just beefed-up sluggers taking their share of steroids, HGH, and whatever else you can conjure up in your head. It was seemingly everyone--journeymen pitchers, utility players, borderline Major Leaguers...nobody can be excluded from the discussion or the suspicion.
It makes perfect sense for borderline big-leaguers and journeymen to be using the stuff; a constant effort to keep up and stay competitive in a game where anyone can be gone with a snap of the fingers and the ring of a telephone. We've known steroids to be an issue on the minor league level, and this is the primary reason for it: players trying to get an edge over everyone else and make it to The Show.
Does that make it right? No, but it makes more sense than a surefire Hall of Famer allegedly beef-roiding himself out of spite for the magical summer Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa brought us back in 1998.
Grimsley's admissions also reveal a problem we should've seen from the very beginning: MLB's steroid testing policy, as good and harsh (and late) as it is, does not test for human growth hormones. It tests for steroids, it tests for amphetamines (which, honestly, I don't see what's so wrong with them)...but it does not test for HGH.
So players can simply change their drug of choice, pass all the random tests and walk around under the specter of "clean player."
Baseball and the World Anti-Doping Agency both say there's no reliable way to test for HGH. Baseball only condusts urine tests, and traces of HGH are only visible in blood tests.
Somehow, I don't buy the "there's no test" argument.
If the Grimsley revelation has shown us one thing, it's that the drug scandal in baseball is much deeper than any of us cared to consider or admit. It's entirely possible that at some point, at least half of the game's players were juicing with something. But, since testing didn't begin until 2003 and tests today don't check for HGH, how can we expect players not to do everything they can to gain an edge?
And make no mistake: though the names Grimsley named were blacked out in the public version of the federal affidavit, those names will become public within the next few weeks. Some intrepid reporter will find out who those names are, and you'll be seeing these names over and over again on SportsCenter. Grimsley will be reviled in the clubhouse, and players all over the league will be shaking in their cleats.
Also, there is no way baseball will ever be completely clean. Even the Olympics, which has arguably the best drug program of any sporting organization, has the occasional positive test. But Bud Selig and Major League Baseball really dropped the ball in the mid- to late 1990s when they turned their back on the scandal, and I'm afraid this is going to get a lot worse before it gets better.
Barry Bonds has been the scapegoat in this scandal--perhaps unfairly--but now there's no doubt: this is deep. This is bad.
So bad, I don't know if the game can recover.
They sadden me. They disgust me. But they do not surprise me.
A lot of baseball experts would have you believe baseball is on its way out of the so-called "Steroid Era," on its way to getting those nasty drugs out of the game and on its way back to integrity and respectability.
As soon as Barry Bonds retires.
But, as I long suspected, this drug scandal goes much, much deeper than Bonds. Bonds might be the biggest name in all this--two books written about him over the past few months and his historic chase of Babe Ruth and Hank Aaron--but he is far from the only one allegedly guilty of juicing.
We now know it wasn't just beefed-up sluggers taking their share of steroids, HGH, and whatever else you can conjure up in your head. It was seemingly everyone--journeymen pitchers, utility players, borderline Major Leaguers...nobody can be excluded from the discussion or the suspicion.
It makes perfect sense for borderline big-leaguers and journeymen to be using the stuff; a constant effort to keep up and stay competitive in a game where anyone can be gone with a snap of the fingers and the ring of a telephone. We've known steroids to be an issue on the minor league level, and this is the primary reason for it: players trying to get an edge over everyone else and make it to The Show.
Does that make it right? No, but it makes more sense than a surefire Hall of Famer allegedly beef-roiding himself out of spite for the magical summer Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa brought us back in 1998.
Grimsley's admissions also reveal a problem we should've seen from the very beginning: MLB's steroid testing policy, as good and harsh (and late) as it is, does not test for human growth hormones. It tests for steroids, it tests for amphetamines (which, honestly, I don't see what's so wrong with them)...but it does not test for HGH.
So players can simply change their drug of choice, pass all the random tests and walk around under the specter of "clean player."
Baseball and the World Anti-Doping Agency both say there's no reliable way to test for HGH. Baseball only condusts urine tests, and traces of HGH are only visible in blood tests.
Somehow, I don't buy the "there's no test" argument.
If the Grimsley revelation has shown us one thing, it's that the drug scandal in baseball is much deeper than any of us cared to consider or admit. It's entirely possible that at some point, at least half of the game's players were juicing with something. But, since testing didn't begin until 2003 and tests today don't check for HGH, how can we expect players not to do everything they can to gain an edge?
And make no mistake: though the names Grimsley named were blacked out in the public version of the federal affidavit, those names will become public within the next few weeks. Some intrepid reporter will find out who those names are, and you'll be seeing these names over and over again on SportsCenter. Grimsley will be reviled in the clubhouse, and players all over the league will be shaking in their cleats.
Also, there is no way baseball will ever be completely clean. Even the Olympics, which has arguably the best drug program of any sporting organization, has the occasional positive test. But Bud Selig and Major League Baseball really dropped the ball in the mid- to late 1990s when they turned their back on the scandal, and I'm afraid this is going to get a lot worse before it gets better.
Barry Bonds has been the scapegoat in this scandal--perhaps unfairly--but now there's no doubt: this is deep. This is bad.
So bad, I don't know if the game can recover.
posted by Jeff Cunningham at 7:31 PM
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