Wednesday, July 10, 2013

The real problem with steroid era

By Jeff

The steroid era has ruined baseball for some people. Every time we see a player have a career power year, like Jacoby Ellsbury Jose Bautista or Chris Davis, the performance enhancing drugs (PED) questions begin to swirl.

It's not fair in the sense that these guys have not failed any drug tests, and the tests have become a lot tougher to cheat. At the same time, how can we not question these guys when players like Rafael Palmeiro and Mark McGwire denied for years before getting caught or admitting to cheating in order to make a run at the Hall of Fame?

But the real problem with the steroid era is we get pointless stories and columns like this one from Rick Reilly.

So a guy asked Davis on Twitter if he cheats and Davis answered no. This leads to a column? And what did we learn from the column? Reilly doesn't fully trust Davis when he says that he doesn't use steroids. That's it.

It was Reilly this time, but every time we get a player having a career year, we have dozens of pointless "Are they using?" or "Can we trust them?" columns that are all the same. It's like an ad lib. The writers just substitute the team and the player.

We don't have to shower these breakout stars with love and adoration like fans did with Sammy Sosa and McGwire during their home run race. It's a good thing to be a little skeptical. But do we need the countless stories, commentaries and columns questioning these players? It's done every year and it's very stale.

3 comments:

  1. I mainly hate how baseball players are guilty until proven innocent, but it's not the same with other sports like football.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I agree. I think it happens with baseball players because so far it has only been big-name baseball players who we have learned used PEDs. If it came out that Brees and Brady were juicing while they were chasing the single-season passing record, or stars the caliber of Bonds, Sosa, McGwire, Palmeiro, A-Rod, etc... AKA the biggest guys in the game, then I think football players would get the same guilty until proven innocent treatment.

    ReplyDelete
  3. True. When Merriman got caught I thought that was gonna start a similar thing in football. It's not really a big deal if stars aren't getting caught.

    I've heard they have good testing in NFL, but those guys have to be on something, right? I just assume everyone is on HGH or something. Deer antler spray can't do everything.

    ReplyDelete