Letters to the Editor
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Mariano "The Sandman" Rivera will be okay
If folks have been watching the games, Rivera's velocity is fine (usu. in the 92-96mph range). It's his location that's been a problem and that's because the Yankee starting staff has been so bad he hasn't been able to get any work.
During the most recent series with Boston, Torre put Rivera in to start the 8th inning of a game in which they were trailing because he hadn't pitched in 4 days. He threw about 25 pitches and wasn't sharp, but, the next day he was able to come in and get an easy save.
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Maybe if they get the big guys...
The problem with lack of interest in steroids stories is that the big players are coated in teflon. Until Barry Bonds gets fired or goes to jail, nobody takes any of the other stuff seriously. Who cares if some former towel boy named Radomski goes down? Maybe it will lead to bigger busts, maybe not. It seems like the only players being implicated are either no-name journeymen or are already retired.
I think it's great that journalists like you are doing your best to keep the story alive and in front of the public. Continued press coverage will probably be more important in minimizing drug use in sports than law enforcement reaction or lame MLB policies. But even an expose as supposedly big as "Game of Shadows" didn't seem to have any real impact on whose playing the game and whose sitting behind bars or selling used cars because they've been banned from the sport.
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Short Attention Spans and 24-hr cable news cycle
We're so overloaded with minutae masquerading as news that important stories don't have staying power - they get their five minutes of focus, then ...scroll down... on to the next story - "Larry Birkhead and Dannielynn's plane has landed!" and "Live! It's a tanker fire!"
The MSM has a short attention span. And we're swallowing up what they're serving with a big ol' spoon.
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But why haven't you talked about . . .
. . . Leeds, six years after challenging for the Champions League title, being relegated all the way down to League One?
Or the Arsenal takeover bid by the Rams, Avalanche, and Nuggets owner Stan Kroenke?
Or those lousy Manchester United scum about to win a Premiership title again after a three-year absence?
Come on, King, how can you not write about these things?
(Do I need a :o) here?)
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Sorry King about the 'roids story
The King seems genuinely disappointed that mainstream media and the fans aren't aghast about the Mets batboy story. Like several other posters have already noted, if and when this guy blows the whistle on some big names, then people will care. Looking at the steroid related events of the last few years, I can't help but conclude that there are really only two groups of people who give a rat's tail about steroids:
1. Journalists like those Game of Shadows guys and their backslapping media peers, all hoping to be known as the Woodward & Bernstein of sportswriters.
2. Grandstanding blowhards in Congress who love to find easy targets that divert from their cluelessness regarding the real hard work of Iraq and the impending insolvency of our Social Security System. These "legislators" are just like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson ranting about Imus instead of trying to tackle poverty, illiteracy, poor health care and all the other real problems facing blacks.
If I'm wrong then why do the turnstiles continue to click and TV/radio ratings are solid? Fans likely don't care, especially when the central figure is Bonds, who was highly unlikeable long before the roid allegations. Do the Bonds apologists forget that this selfish jerk was known as "Stat-Man" in the early 1990's?
as someone above me also noted, it's a shame that Griffey has spent the last 6 years on the DL, otherwise Bonds would be nothing more than a historical footnote
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Waste of Space?
King,
One question. Your reaction to getting numerous letters complaining that you wasted an entire column on steroids is to waste ANOTHER column on the same subject?
I think G.W.Bush has an opening you could do a heckuva job in.
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One quick note
Just have to defend my boy Selig here.
Bud Selig didn't release anything on a Friday afternoon. It was a plea in a federal court case.
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Maybe if they get the big guys...
The problem may be that many of the "big guys" can afford the designer PEDs for which there are no reliable tests. Note that of all the players excoriated by the self-rightous commentariat - the same talking heads that looked the other way - only Palmerio has failed a steroid test. Couple that with the fact that MLB really hasn't the stomach for bringing down their biggest gate attractions and I doubt that a lot will happen. Even if Chairman Bud turned into Bud the Crusader, the union and the player's attorneys aren't going to let their clients' livelihood be taken away in the absence of concrete proof - nor should they.
To the extent that we will ever know who took what for how long, I think use (of those PEDs for which tests exist) will be found to be most prevalent among the AAAA players - the guys trying to hang on at the major league level or the guys who believe they are just a step away. The vast majority of failed tests since the drug policy was instituted (motto: "This time it counts") have come from this group.
As long as everyone is in high dudgeon over this particular brand of "cheating", wouldn't it be a good idea to get some empirical data that define how steroids (or other PEDs such as hGH and amphetamines) actually enhance an individual's baseball performance, if in fact they do? There seem to be a lot of assumptions, particularly with respect to power hitters, but real evidence is thin on the ground.
Most of the assertions take the form of "Player X is hitting more balls over 450 feet than he did earlier in his career, so I think he's on steroids because I hear that steroids make you stronger". Or "Player Y has a bigger head (usually diagnosed from a comfy armchair in front of the TV by a graduate of the Bill Frist School of Diagnostic Technique) and that means he's on hGH" Usually these bits of "evidence" are advanced by people who have already decided that Players X and Y (and most other players) are juiced. These are examples of conformational bias, and there's a lot of this going around.
Frankly, I'm not quite sure why we all have our knickers in a collective twist. Athletes have endeavored to find an edge - legitimate or otherwise - since they started getting paid to play these games. As the money stakes have grown, so have the efforts in seeking that edge. And it will continue
Cheating has always been a part of these games. As far as the sacred record books, it's hard to see how PED use defaces them any more than the antics of those Baltimore Orioles teams of the 1890s. When John McGraw grabbed Slidin' Billy Hamilton's uniform belt and held him at third to prevent him from scoring, he subtracted one run from Hamilton's career total - a run in the absence of cheating that would have been credited in the record book. Since the incidents of these antics were replete during the period, who can say how many runs or RBIs or anything else should be actually credited or subtracted ? How are PEDs any different from the point of view of the record book?