Letters to the Editor
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Don't Stop Covering the Steroids Scandal
Sports competitions are interesting because we don't know what's going to happen and because either competitor could conceivably win. It would not be fun to watch the Dallas Mavericks play the local junior high's JV team; the Professional Shooting Fish In A Barrel League would not draw well. Its all based on a level playing field. Cheating, whether it be recruiting a player who wouldn't ordinarily be allowed to play for your team or taking performance enhancing drugs, artificially alters this, but the fan watching doesn't know. Ignorance may be bliss, but it destroys the ability to truly appreciate reality. I thought Ben Johnson's 100 meter dash win in the Olympics was the most amazing physical accomplishment ever; it was as close to Superman as we were going to get. Until it was announced he was juiced. I guess there's part of me that wishes that story had never come out, because it was so amazing, but it did and allowed me to fully appreciate Michael Johnson's 200 meter win all the more a few years later. If you and other journalists do not continue to cover these stories, sports fans will unknowingly be participating in a lie. If the leaked grand jury testimony is true, Barry Bonds admitted to using PEDs when we thought he was just performing amazing acts of hitting. This is wrong and must be exposed, even if a bunch of Giants' fans don't want it to be. The public's desire to put its head in the sand doesn't make ignorance okay (see Iraq war).
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Going, going, gone
I've been a classic baseball fan for years. A lot of years. I'm through. Baseball is dead and Gary Mathews Jr. killed it. I have followed the Rangers, and I cheered for this juicehead. There is no longer a game. No winners or losers or records. Baseball can get the fuck off my TV, my radio, my newspaper. It isn't worth a second of my time. Joan Walsh can have it. I'm already gone.
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The Gerbil
The Gerbil is an has always been a moron.
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Know what I'm sick of
Screechy Sports 'commentators' who piss and moan and shake their fists at god for every real or peceived so called moral lapse or supposed besmirching of the purity of the game, whatever the fuck that means. I say we take all the babbling bobbleheads and toss them to the lions.
Sorry assholes, but even the ex MLB players on ESPN couldn't hit a major league fastball that well if at all. Anyone who tells me you stick a needle in your ass and like magic you can do that needs to stop huffing their own performance enhancing paint thinner.
You want to know what real 'purity of the game' is?n It's when you watch a baseball game and you don't give a shit about the #3 highest on base percentage in Detroit on a Thursday when the temperature was below 67 degrees for a right hander who also did the same feat in St Louis on a day of the week who's numerical value of the spelling of the pitchers name is higher than the batting average of the hitter opposing him.
Fact is Stat-o-mania and Freakazoids like Stump the Schwab is what will eventually kill baseball.
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24/7 Steroids
I agree with your views on the Metboy, Batboy, the Long Island BALCO steroid scandal.
We are 24/7 steroids at our blog: Steroid Nation
We keep thinking, 'this is the very last steroids story ever', or 'OK, now we need to go back to our real job because no one is interested anymore', or 'even we are getting sick of the steroid stories'. However, the stories keep coming.
However, what happened this weekend? The Metboy story breaks, which might (should be capital M) name 20-30-40 names of PED users. Operation Puerto in Europe adds another 50 or so cyclists, and a 5000 page document on the investigation. Mother's marathon in Duluth added new rules since a female winner last was juicing. Floyd Landis still simmers in some lab steroid soup somewhere. Barry Bonds (with anabolic steroids, HGH, insulin, modafanil, Clomid, and amphetamines on board) moves closer to arguably the most sacred of career records in sports.
It's everywhere, it's everywhere.
Although Americans tire of stories relatively quickly, how can they tire of something so in their face (or in their butt) every day? Accommodation?
The real story is cheating. We cheat in the run up to the Iraq war. We cheat in the presidential election. We cheat in oil prices. We cheat our stockholders. We cheat college students in giving loans. We cheat victims of Katrina....blah blah.
Apparently readers (fans) do tune out the drug-cheating...and the political cheating, and the business cheating. How could anyone make it through the day if he actually acknowledged how stacked the deck is toward the cheaters?
As one reader said, it is much like the corruption in college sports, that continues season after season after season after....
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See what happens when you talk smack?
"And so does Marino Rivera ("just doesn't have location", hah!)..."
Perhaps Jonathan Papelbon need better location tonight.
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Cashman is the problem
The Yankees consistently trade away young talent and overspend for old, dwindling, injury-plagued talent.
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Phony Holiness
If steroid use is a sacrilige to baseball, then banish every single users. All or none. It ain't about Bonds, who was better than anyone before he allegedly used, and is at the top again at age 42. Banish everyone, batboys on up, or shut the fuck up.
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Why no brouhaha
It's simple, King: there were no names named. The story is an invitation to speculate and we already knew that a lot of players were juiced. Essentially, it wasn't news, but rather a story about a likely future story. When (or possibly, if) that future story hits, it will be big.
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KStone...
"Perhaps Jonathan Papelbon need better location tonight."
Yea, like somewhere that wasn't Oakland. Oh, well. Can't save them all. Just ask Rivera. He knows...
How many homers did the Slugging% King (ARod) hit in the 10-1 blowout last night? Real clutch, that guy...
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Give It Time, King
As soon as the redacted player names are unredacted, people will start talking.
But count me too as someone who doesn't think PEDs can do everything. In 1941, presumably way before anything much was available (maybe speed?), Ted Williams hit over .400 and Joe DiMaggio had a 56-game hitting streak. No one has come close to either record other than George Brett hitting .390 in 1980, and even that was decidedly pre-roids. Maybe PEDs can help you hit a ball harder and farther, but they won't help you see it any better.