Steroids Mess With Your Mind

Steroids can cause great harm to your mind. But no, I’m not talking about the baseball players that use them.

The one great point that seems to be missed by everybody is that in the Mitchell Report, for every big name player identified, there are three players you’ve never heard about or were at best non entities: Manny Alexander, Mike Bell, and Larry Bigbie on the list. This suggests to me that at the very least that steroids aren’t a magic “Superstar pill.” that can take Rafeal Belliard and turn him into Babe Ruth.

What we can say about steroids is that they can help players come back from injuries and give them greater endurance over a 162-game period. So, instead of hitting 73 Homers in 2001, perhaps Barry Bonds would have only hit 63 during the several year period he used steroids.

The Mitchell Report is notable for the name you don’t see on the list: Mr. Mark McGwire. While Senator Mitchell names every Tom, Dick, and Alfonse that he found a solid steroid connection to, Mark McGwire is not accused. However, don’t expect the Baseball Writers to open up Cooperstown’s doors to McGwire. After all he refused to Cooperate with the self-righteous idiotic investigation conducted by pompous Congressmen looking to agrandize themselves. Besides, they tell us, for everyone on this banned substance list, there are several players that are not.

A nice piece of “reasoning” that allows us to make a balnket guilty verdict against all players.

Regarding Roger Clemens, I find Curt Schilling’s suggestion that Roger return his Cy Youngs if he can’t prove himself innocent to be inane. First of all, you can’t prove you didn’t do steroids any more than you can prove you’ve never sped and you’ve never drank. Also as ESPN notes, none of Clemens’ steroid use included 1997 or 2004 (two years Clemens won Cy Young awards in) and the Blue Jays trainer while Clemens was there defended him:

Tommy Craig, the Blue Jays’ former longtime trainer, refuted the report’s claims from Clemens’ Toronto years, during which Craig worked as head trainer.

“Roger never gave me any reason to believe anything like that was going on,” Craig told the Toronto Sun. “He was a hard-working fool, a guy that you’d wish every one of your players would model themselves after as far as fitness and training and, on game day, his focus and all that. But I never saw anything out of the ordinary.

“I mean, Roger didn’t get obviously bigger. He didn’t change, didn’t get a squeaky voice, didn’t have any hair sprouting out. I didn’t have any reason to believe anything was going on.”

Hopefully, it’s proof enough for Curt to let Roger hang on to his 4th and 5th Cy Young Awards.

By the way,  hats off to Derek Jeter for sticking up for Roger and being a voice of sanity in this sea of insanity. Also, Roger Clemens has issued a denial of using steroids and for my part, I believe him.

Perhaps the worst suggestion is that this situation is comparable to the Black Sox Scandal of 1919 and Pete Rose. Rose, who would like to be re-enstated, makes his case:

“I never thought anybody would make me look like an altar boy,” Rose said.

“I’ve been suspended 18 years for betting on my own team to win,” he added. “I was wrong … but these guys today, if the allegations are true, they’re making a mockery of the game.”

“If you’re going to put these guys that supposedly did steroids into the Hall of Fame, I mean I’ve got to get a shot somewhere,” he said.

Thomas Sowell gets in on the action, too, comparing the situation to the 1919 Black Sox scandal:

The law has already spoken in the case of Michael Vick. It is too early to say what the law will do in the case of Barry Bonds and others involved in the steroid controversy.

But it is not too early to point out that what the law does or does not do is separate from what the people in charge of professional sports do.

In a court of law, the accused is presumed to be “innocent until proven guilty” beyond a reasonable doubt. But too many people mindlessly repeat that phrase for things outside of courts.

All the ballplayers accused of throwing the 1919 World Series were acquitted in a court of law — and all were nevertheless banned from baseball for life anyway by the commissioner of baseball.

There is still some lingering hope of sanity in the baseball writers’ refusal to vote Mark McGwire into the Baseball Hall of Fame, despite his tremendous career achievements. Keeping known rule-breakers out of Cooperstown would be a lot more effective deterrent than putting asterisks alongside their records, to be disregarded by those who are “non-judgmental.”

Sowell’s analysis is much sharper than Rose’s self-serving argument, but both seem to miss a point. What rule did players who used steroids violate? They violated the law of the United States and that’s something that Sowell points out is to be addressed by the courts. Unlike Pete Rose who played more games than anyone in History and saw Rule 21(D) more times than anyone in history and chose to bet on baseball, there was no rule against using steroids in Major League baseball. It was only recent banned.

Punishing Major Leaguers for using performance enhancing substances before 2003 is unjust, because there was no rule that was broken. I’ve admitted in the past that I used Ephedra before it was banned. What Sowell’s proposing would be akin to prosecuting me today as an illegal drug user even though the substance I used wasn’t illegal when I used it. It would be blatantly unconstitutional and UnAmerican, yet this is what’s being proposed for baseball.

In addition to this, we do have a punishment system in place for dealing with steroids in Major League Baseball and it is not one strike and you’re out. To say we’d ban Roger Clemens from baseball forever because he took steroids in 1998 would seem absurd, particularly if we catch a player using steroids today, we’ll only give him a 50 game suspension. And he may have used steroids several times before we caught him, but it’s still only 50 games.

I agree with Sowell on the need for following the rules, but we must be following actual written rules that are in place at the time of the offense, not merely deciding after the fact, we’re going to declare it a rule because we feel it’s the way it should be.

In addition, there’s a fine point to be made as Senator Mitchell stated:

“Everyone involved in baseball over the past two decades — commissioners, club officials, the players’ association and players — shares to some extent the responsibility for the Steroids Era,” Mitchell said. “There was a collective failure to recognize the problem as it emerged and to deal with it early on.”

If we’re going to start banning players and punishing them, what about the others? If you really want to compare this to the Black Sox Scandal, remember that Buck Weaver was banned from baseball for life despite the fact he didn’t partake the scandal, he knew about it and failed to report it. If we apply a Buck Weaver standards to everyone who knew about steroids in baseball, how many people would be left? And Cal Thomas extends this even further to Hall of Fame voters:

What will members of the Baseball Writers’ Association of America do when it comes time to elect players to the Baseball Hall of Fame? While some sports journalists were on top of the steroid abuse early — the San Francisco Chronicle, Sports Illustrated and NBC’s Bob Costas were among them — too many others enjoyed the story of superheroes with impossible bodies hitting the home run ball and setting new records. If some of those writers looked the other way, are they fit to judge the qualifications of players about whose alleged steroid abuse they might have known but declined to report?

Indeed. “Let him who is without sin, cast the first stone.”