2013 MLB Hall of Fame Screechfest

I bet they considered him a gamer too. Mostly because they all had their own gamers.

I don't know what would be an accurate percentage of steroid users. Was it 50 percent as Schilling said, before he realized "Oh shit someone's actually reading this" and backtracked? More? Less?

I'd bet a paycheck, though, that 100 percent of teams had a steroid user in the lineup every night between, say, 1999 and 2003.

 

I'm sure some did.

But I've definitely had players gripe to me, off the record, about steroid use. About the Giambis, in particular, I recall from one guy. And plenty have groused on the record, as well. Jeff Kent was one you mentioned.

Did anyone ever bitch about greenie use? At all?

 

Well, no one knew about greenie use before Bouton revealed it, and in 1969, there was a high tolerance of drug use, and no ESPN around to flog the issue around the clock. And steroids has since knocked greenies to the far back of the line of history.

 

And, again: No East Germans and Ruskies using steroids yet. At least not known to have. Yet.

You think if Mark Spitz was the first to come to light as a steroid-user that Americans would have reacted the same way?

"Our boy was just using good old American ingenuity to get ahead! Outsmarted 'em all!"

 

And, FWIW, this isn't merely an American moral panic, as we think of drug panics typically.

Other countries are way more uptight about steroids than we are. They have been trying for many years to coerce the U.S. government into taking over drug-testing of professional sports here, but the Fourth Amendment precludes it.

Americans are largely seen as cheaters to the rest of the world.

 

Well, the East German women-steroids link sustained a new stand-up comic meme for about a decade

 

I ask this as a genuine question because I've lost track of some parts of different posters' arguments. Were you among those claiming that players being kept out of the Hall of Fame, even temporarily, weren't being punished?

 

hey, oop, it's the HOF that has the morality clause ... why do you want to continue to bust the balls of the voters who want to uphold the will of the hall? i mean really, the hall itself has a clause, why can't you get over that?

that POS rose isn't in. do you also shed a tear about that?

 

"Genuine question," OOP? Somehow I doubt it. I don't think waiting on a player, under the 15 years of eligibility allowed in the balloting process, is punishment. You can keep saying that it is, but that doesn't make it so. That period of consideration is there for the voters and the players.

Now, not voting for a guy who used PEDs, that might be "punishment" in your view. I' don't think I even agree with that. If I choose not to vote toward bestowing a privilege on a guy who invalidated himself as a cheater, am I really punishing him? If the sixth graders who get straight A's get to go to a baseball game as a reward and one of them is found to have cheated on a test to achieve an A, is someone punishing him to not bring him? Or did he do that to himself?

And no, those aren't genuine questions, they're rhetorical.

 

Here's a question...

Using steroids without a prescription is against the law in the United States, but it's not against the law in every country.

Let's say a guy played before MLB tested and he lived in the Dominican over the winter and juiced like crazy all winter?

 

Also, Lyle Alzado.

"Steroids are dangerous and they will kill you."

And yet, we are more of a pill-popping "enhancement" culture today than ever before; sports being, as always, a microcosm of society. Highly paid professional athletes just have access (and incentive) to take better drugs.

I've long thought if any of us could take a pill that guaranteed us 5-10 years of great professional success, wealth, fame, etc. in exchange for 5 years of our lives ... a strong percentage of us would take that pill. Others would not. Not sure what that says about us except we're all human.

 

This goes back to what Dick and I were discussing earlier:

Is this behavior — taking steroids in general and/or taking steroids in an attempt to enhance performance, because the answer could be different for each question — an objectively "wrong" behavior?

Or is it our socially-agreed-upon law that makes it "wrong"?

Because if it's the latter, then Bobcat's question is of the utmost importance: Why is it considered "wrong" here and not somewhere else? And what, then, makes our socially-agreed-upon standard "right"?