Saturday, May 18, 2013
Murray Chass: ARE RED SOX REELING ALREADY?
(www.murraychass.com)
Read More...Shaughnessy is too good to have to invent anything. He neither invented anything in this instance nor accused Ortiz of using steroids and their cousins. What he did was take his skepticism and his curiosity, good traits for a newspaperman to have, and ask Ortiz about steroids. Ortiz’s responses did not indicate anger of being accused of wrong doing.
I would compare the Ortiz column to the columns I have written about Mike Piazza and my suspicions about his possible use of steroids. I ...
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1 2 >That's the whole point, though. Gibson took a substance under supervision by a doctor and with public knowledge. It's not cheating if you don't try and hide it. Doing it in the open allows us to have a frank and open discussion about what people are doing and if it should be permitted. Same goes for advances in golf clubs.
It is the very fact that we don't know for certain who was doing anabolic steroids or how much they were doing that has poisoned the whole sport. Players still aren't talking. The cover-up exacerbates the whole thing 100-fold.
I have a greater responsibility than you can possibly fathom. You weep for Sosa and you curse Bonds. You have that luxury. You have the luxury of not knowing what I know: that Bonds', Sosa's and McGwire's usage, while tragic, probably saved the game. And the use of steroids, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, saved the game. You don't want the truth. Because deep down, in places you don't talk about at parties, you want me to hit balls far over that wall. You need me to cross that wall.
We use words like honor, code, loyalty...we use these words as the backbone to a life spent playing the game. Hall of Fame voters use 'em as a punchline. I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to writers who write and profit from the entertainment I provide, then question the manner in which I provide it! I'd rather they just said thank you and went on their way.
Otherwise, I suggest you pick up a ball, get on the mound and stand opposed. Either way, I don't give a damn what you think you're entitled to!
As to using them openly, what happens if you use something that is viewed as 'bad' right now, regardless of doctors help (such as marijuana in many areas of the US)? You get arrested. Similar for ballplayers. If one says 'HGH won't hurt me and my doctor says how it can be used safely' and releases all paperwork showing it he'd still be labeled a cheater and viewed negatively by the press for pushing to make something against the rules legal to use. Thus the question of cortisone shots (which basically seem to let a guy play even though his body is saying 'don't or else') vs other steroids is more a 'we have used it for years so who cares'. Much like alcohol and cigarettes - both far more deadly than marijuana but try to make them illegal or put restrictions on them and you have a fight, just like you do if you try to make marijuana legal.
Logic and science are missing often in societal decisions. Trying to put logic into why item X is allowed and Y is not tends to just frustrate the person who is trying to use logic.
also, yeah, i saw "a few good men" on AMC last night, too.
And by that token, anabolic steroids are "performance enabling" by allowing muscles to recover from the cortisol that physically prevents people from making the most of their workouts.
Actually McGwire, Pettite, and a whole host of other players have all said they took steroids to recover from injuries.
A player that is injured but takes something that allows him to play through the injury at a level above what he would perform when injured is in fact enhancing his performance.
What could possibly be more performance enhancing than something that allows an athlete to take the field when he or she otherwise could not?
You want it under the supervision of a doctor? Fine, Bosch (at least one of them) is a doctor. I'd be perfectly comfortable with requiring all uses of drugs in baseball requiring medical supervision. Preferably in conjunction with effective oversight of those doctors but that's a broader social issue. STill, say what you want about BALCO, they sure seemed to be keeping a close eye on their clients and were providing quality service.
You want openness. Excellent idea. I would love the NFL and college and high school football in particular to expose just how many shots and pills they are handing out each week and to whom and for what purpose.
And catheter in the penis? Never mind, I don't want to know.
Sorry, that would be post enhancing, not enabling. Can't do it.
Seriously? This is what you're going to try and hang your hat on? A completely meaningless, arbitrary, pedantic distinction between "enabling" and "enhancing?" That's pathetic.
(*) I'm pulling numbers out of my ass...I don't know what testosterone levals are.
This is by far the best example of begging the question I've seen in a long time. Way to miss the point.
Gibson had his cortisone shot transparently because it wasn't (and isn't) banned. They'd be widely taking HGH transparently and with medical supervision too if they could (or as in the NFL, where they do this stuff with medical supervision if not transparently). McGwire's andro was famously in his locker when it wasn't against the rules - people still think he was cheating.
Echoing the kudos for LeBatard here. My respect for him just ratcheted way up.
In football, the players are bigger and stronger and faster, but that just means that (1) the players offset each other and (2) strategies, tactics and rules change to adapt.
In baseball, you get more statistial outliers (60+ HRs, < 2 ERAs) as individuals are more able to take advantage of individual matchups and exploit natural talent/performance disparities, and those records matter to people. For whatever reason, baseball has a "performance cap" that I think is influenced by history.
So, while I'm generally in the camp of being pro-PED usage (or anti-PED prohibition), I can see that its a more sensitive issue to baseball than it is to other sports.
Really? Then it must have improved a LOT from the first week. I used to LOVE his radio show from Miami (via podcast) and was really looking forward to his show on ESPN. Then I watched the first few episodes. Bleech. I no longer have cable, so I can't check, but he had a big gap to make up...
I think that's a silly distinction for reasons stated above. However, I think the issue is that PEDs are believed to have negative long-term health effects, while cortisone, as far as I know, does not, at least not in the Gibson context. Now, Emmitt Smith getting loaded up with cortisone to the point he can't feel his arms, then going out and rushing for 200 yards? That might have some negative long-term health effects. No serious person would argue players shouldn't be allowed enhancements to their performance that aren't completely natural. Players take creatine, take legal stimulants, heck Gatorade enhances their performance! We just don't want to see them risking their serious long-term health to do so.
I haven't seen it, but I've long thought LeBatard to be one of the more thoughtful national sports columnists with my only caveats being he seems really high on himself, and he is a bit too much of an apologist for players at times.
Scoring is waaaaay up in the NFL and the game is more popular than ever. People don't care about historical stats in football. They do care about historical stats in baseball.
I also will say that long term health is a red herring in this debate. We don't care about a player's long term health and we never have.
Let me double up on this one. No one is refusing to vote Barry Bonds into the HOF because they're concerned about his reproductive functioning. They refuse to vote Bonds in because he had the audacity to hit more HRs than Hank Aaron, and the unthinking moralist brigades have decided randomly that Bonds' achievements were "unnatural" while Aaron's were not.
Which again poses the question: Why did the HOF voters of, roughly, 1975-90 (*) not defend the "clean" players of the pre-greenie era -- their "boyhood heroes" like Lou Gehrig, Joe D., Yogi, etc -- against the assault on morals and the game's record book of hippie pill-poppers like Aaron and Stargell?
This is where the anit-greenie argument, tenuous to begin with, crumbles.
(*) The point here, of course, is not precision in the years, but to note that there was a HOF voting era in which the predations of the pill-poppers was well known and the HOF still without a known pill-popper soiling its corridors.
So which is it? Was steroid use like going 42 in a 35 MPH zone? Or was it flagrantly running red lights?
They were fighting the communists!
But in all seriousness it is because they weren't viewed as hippie pill poppers by themselves or the media. I remember about a decade or so ago I watched a documentary about sports in the 1960's and one of the issues they talked about was drugged. They had some pro athlete talking about their time in the 60's and how he and his teammates hated hippies and their drug use and yet he realized years later that at the time he was more drugged up than the hippies.
The 50's, 60's, and 70's were really a different time and culture than what currently exists in America.
If Hank Aaron and the stars of his generation were playing nowadays and they were all popping pills now like they were then they would get a totally different reception than they did back then.
Because greenies enhance performance invisibly - by changing brain chemistry, while HGH enhances performance visibly, by changing muscle chemistry. And sportswriters aren't the sharpest tools in the shed, sometimes.
Also, there's definitly a different mindset when you're using laced coffee, and comparing your use to people sitting around stoned. God knows, I've said "At leastI'mgettingthehouseclean!!!" more than once.
Yes, exactly. Whereas roiders are viewed by themselves and the media as roiders.
The 50's, 60's, and 70's were really a different time and culture than what currently exists in America.
Pill poppers were inducted to the HOF well after the 1970s ended, including several in the wake of the Pittsburgh drug trials of the mid-80s.
Or, to put the disconnect into one historical document. Okay, this isn't a jock, but the contradiction was just as risible and blatant.
The hippies were largely middle class dropouts whose gurus were from the same class. They may have been using the same drugs that the street people and blue collar types were hooked on, but other than that they had little or nothing in common, especially when it came to their political views.
The 50's, 60's, and 70's were really a different time and culture than what currently exists in America.
If only more people realized that, these steroid discussions would be a lot more informative.
Yes, if there was less hypocritical ######## about modern drug usage as opposed to historical drug usage, things wouldn't be nearly as stupid.
So?
There's no hypocrisy. They're different drugs, with different impacts and different circumstances of use. Two generations of HOF voters, with significantly different historical experiences and influences, have had the opportunity to weigh in on amp use in baseball and neither has seen fit to deem it worthy of reputational penalty. The earlier generation could have defended the HOF, and their boyhood heroes, from being soiled by amp users, and didn't.
(And of course, even today, MLB allows players to play amped up. Dozens of players trodding the mallparks of 2013 will be hopped up pill-poppers.)
So the permissive culture of the late 60s and 70s got significantly less so, and pill-popper druggies were still voted into the HOF en masse.
So?
One changes chemistry internally. The other externally. The distinction is completely due to the fact that people are idiots.
Isn't it pretty to think so?
An NFL team doctor would never worry about that.
That's kind of like bragging that you have the tastiest vomit.
Le Batard is a legitimately good sportswriter, though.
Even more disturbing is the portrayal in the movie "Friday Night Lights" when high school player Boobie Myles gets hurt and everyone - coaches, players, fans, family, all pressure him to get back on the field before he's ready.
Right...isn't the story that Modine is young and naive, and the older doctor played by James Woods doesn't bat an eyelash about this stuff?
Nor were the voters of, say, 1985, weighing the differences between amps and steroids. They were weighing the differences between amps and not amps. They picked amps -- overwhelmingly. So amps have been deemed not worthy of concern as against both steroids and ... no drugs at all. That's a pretty definitive reocrd.
Fixed it.
I've always taken the position that professional sports should remove restrictions against medically-supervised PED use in exchange for (1) full disclosure about what athletes are using, (2) a full-fledged program to educate people on what's being used, the benefits of supervised use, and the risks of unsupervised use (and abuse).
-- MWE
McLain said that between 1968 and 1969, when he went a combined 55-15 and threw 661 innings, he took 43 injections of cortisone to be able to pitch through pain.
The Tigers knew full-well that Denny's arm was hamburger when they peddled him to Washington.
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