HELP! McCarver’s buckethead just sprung a nasty leak and all sortsa gooey cerebrospinal fluid is splatter-matting!
During Tuesday night’s All-Star broadcast, I’d be willing to bet almost anything that at some point Tim McCarver will bring up his old battery-mate Bob Gibson as an example of the good ol’ days in baseball, when players didn’t take steroids and there were no pitch counts.
Gibson has certainly been making the rounds with the All-Star Game in St. Louis this year. Tuesday morning he did a spot with ESPN Radio’s Mike and Mike, and the inevitable subject of steroids in baseball came up. In an incredibly honest answer, Gibson told the hosts that baseball players have been cheating for years and if it were up to him, he wouldn’t keep known steroid users out of the Hall of Fame. A longer version of his quote is after the jump .
Guys have always been cheating. Period. It just takes a little different form today. I’m just glad they didn’t have steroids when I was playing. I don’t know what I would have done. It’s very difficult to go out and perform when you know the guy next to you is taking steroids or some kind of drug to make you perform better and not do it yourself, to let this guy get an edge on you.
[...]
I don’t know that I really criticize the guys. Whoever the first guy is that started it, that’s the guy I criticize. The rest of the guys just followed suit. I don’t think its OK. I’m not sanctioning it, but I understand why it happens.”
When asked if players known to take performance-enhancing drugs should be in the Hall of Fame, Gibson responded, “Oh yeah, I think so.”
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Once again, Andy repeats this nonsense, misrepresenting Bouton's claims in a desperate attempt to support it. Apparently in Andy's world, 90% of players are hung over. (Also, they're still playing mostly day games, so that "nights on the town" leave them too tired to play.)
And once again, you quote selectively in order to imply that you've addressed a point. You're as addicted to that practice as any junkie is to his fix.
FTFY
Oh, I'm dealing with that just fine. Doesn't bother me in the slightest, any more than it bothers you.
My point was actually trying to agree with yours. amphetamines are in no uncertain terms performance enhancing drugs and no matter how people try to compare coffee and red bull to amps or deny that increasing from a base line of 0 ( hung over no energy etc) to one of 100% (ready to play ,full of beans and able to concentrate at a high level) is somehow not an enhancement, clearly it is.
I have had some experience in this matter, when I was young and stupid I took amps on a fairly regular basis for about a year, and to compare what they do and how they make you feel vs coffee and red bull or whatever else people want to toss out there is simply poor comparisions, these drugs are regulated for a reason , unlike coffee or red bull.
It is possible. Its also not untoward to wander about Rose's connection to a known steroid dealer that he allowed to live at his residence.
I didn't pick Rose though. That is sort of the gotcha' point that is thrown out there. If the goal is to try to extract information (rather than just advocate a point) about the performance effects of amphetamines, we can pick someone else. Just tell me the player, the accomplishment, what evidence we have that they used amphetamines, what evidence we have on the frequency of use, and what we opine the effect to be.
The effects of greenies vs. steroids may well be different--as they would for any two players taking the same drug, or the same player taking the same drug twice at different times in his career. But that's an argument about something else, not about cheating. The only way taking greenies isn't cheating is if they have no effect at all; and even then, it's a failed attempt at cheating, which isn't at all a morally superior position to succeeding at cheating.
But it's a bit silly to say they work because people use them. Millions of people continually avoid walking under ladders or near black cats; are those strategies effective? Is breathing through your eyelids an effective way of improving a pitcher's control? The human brain is poorly wired for strategic thinking. The fact that the multi-billion dollar supplement industry exists is evidence of that
On a different note, if we hadn't already been in an era in which home runs flourished, homer totals would not have been as high, and people would be generally far more comfortable with the same amount of steroid use.
Disney Oswalt - Note that there almost certainly have been a significant number of players who took greenies without knowing, given the amount of spiking that was done in clubhouses in the past, so things are a little more complicated.
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