BBWAA: Mark McGwire died for your sins

Re: BBWA: Mark McGwire died for your sins

Golly Gee Mr. Mark I noticed that you were hurt for a couple of years and hit only 9 HRs in 92 and 93. What kind of training did you do to go from 9 homers to 52 home runs in 2 years? Gee, In my paper there's an ad for the Charles Atlas workout program. Maybe you've seen it in the back of the Popeye comic book? You know where Popeye eats this magic spinach and he gets real strong, real muscular but has a real mean attitude. Hey Mr. Mark, didn't you used to be kind of skinny?

I don't know, maybe the reporters shold have asked some questions, talked to some people, called some experts and said, how does someone go from 195 lb to 235 lbs in a couple of year and only put on muscle. What are the signs of steroid use? How could one spot it?
All these great journalists, and no one broke the most significant sports scandal in the last 25 years?
Not one journalist had a clue? Not one member of the BBWA, had an inkling over 4 years that steroids may be used?
Yeah, that's journalistic malpractice.

 

Re: BBWA: Mark McGwire died for your sins

What Reilly did was grandstanding.

You don't think what Kiszla did was wrong?
Ok, so I'm visiting your house, I go to take a pee, I open your medicine cabinet and see the prescriptions for Xanax, Zoloft, Valium and I walk out with them in my hand and say "Got a problem, Mizzou?"

Perfectly all right with you?

 

Re: BBWA: Mark McGwire died for your sins

Well how many BBWA did not put McGwire's name on their HOF ballot because of conjecture?

 

Re: BBWA: Mark McGwire died for your sins

If no one broke the story, we wouldn't know about it today.

 

Re: BBWA: Mark McGwire died for your sins

I've said it before -- and I'll say it again.

What I'm not saying is that baseball beat writers are dogged investigative reporters as a group.

But what exactly were they supposed to be reporting back then? They had nothing. How do you "investigate" personal behavior, done in private.

What smoking guns were they supposed to see? What documents were they supposed to unearth? Were they supposed to write, "Gee, Mark McGwire's gotten big. Experts say that's a sign of doing steroids. So in this exclusive report, we tell you: Mark McGwire's doing steroids." Yeah, that'd be good reporting -- if you like lawsuits.

Unless A) somebody got arrested for steroid possession or B) somebody simply came out and admitted juicing, what did baseball writers ignore? There was no testing for steroids back then, either.

There was nothing to report on the baseball/steroid front until BALCO, and leaked grand jury testimony.

This "why didn't baseball writers do their jobs?" is a tiresome, specious argument -- until somebody can tell me specifically what the hell it is they were supposed to be doing in this regard.

 

Re: BBWA: Mark McGwire died for your sins

Isn't that akin to saying you don't understand why the Yankees traded Jay Buhner?

 

Re: BBWA: Mark McGwire died for your sins

Ben Johnson tests positive for steroids in the Olympics, many other track and field and Olympic-type athletes test postive. You know what they looked like before they set world record and after. You have similar ideas about non Olympic athletes. You ask questions. You ask Bud Selig about testing. You ask experts. You speculated, openly, about juiced balls in 1986. 12 years later you do it also, but you have other points of conjecture. You're in locker room, people talk, people see things.

A couple of San Fran writers did cover the hell out of it. They heard of Balco. They connected a few dots between Montgomery and Bonds.

It just seems that alot of people that are paid to know better, to be curious, to speculate, to be cynical, drank the Kool Aid, forgot their positions, lead the cheers, and a few years later act betrayed and lash out in guilt ridden anger.

 

Re: BBWA: Mark McGwire died for your sins

This is a thread I like.

The baseball coverage has been nothing short of high comedy for the last 9 to 10 years.

Currently the tack is to say "We don't need no proof," then write a bunch of stupid shit that's easily discredited -- like the Jason Grimsley naming of names that no one seems to acknowledge these days.

Now we have a bunch of people holding hands, singing "Kum Ba Yah" and hoping for mercy from the court, when the only argument has no legal teeth.

 

Re: BBWA: Mark McGwire died for your sins

10,000 years; 10,000 posts.

 

Re: BBWA: Mark McGwire died for your sins

What the press could have done is turn a critical eye on baseball and done investigative work. It wouldn't have been the first time that a newspaper has stirred up Congressional and criminal investigations. Any number of papers had the resources at the time to pull other staff writers onto a big project and turn them loose.
It isn't the baseball writers' fault, but they can certainly take a share of the blame. Especially those who wrote books talking about how great baseball was then.
You also have to remember the climate of the late 90s. Newspapers were fixated on Clinton. Several media companies had an ownership interest in baseball teams and do you really think the Tribune Company was going to let loose the Trib's hounds on Sosa? Big media has a big interest in the commercial success of major league baseball.

 

Re: BBWA: Mark McGwire died for your sins

Except that isn't the really issue abbott is talking about, SF.

He's saying if you didn't do your job investigating steroids 10 years ago, don't punish McGwire for it now when you still can't prove anything happened. I happen to agree. By saying that McGwire isn't a Hall of Famer now, even if you celebrated him in all his glory in '98, feels like wanting to have it both ways. Especially if all you did in the interim was write gamers, take quotes, and collect Marriot points. The baseball beat is a hard fucking job. I couldn't do it. And you're right. Maybe there is nothing that scribes could have done. But it's a tad disingenuous to punish McGwire for something that wasn't against the rules, ignoring the fact that you celebrated him not that long ago, then did nothing to (unless your name is Tom Verducci) back up your opinion that players were using steroids.

It's exactly why I would have put him in the HOF and said, as a baseball writer, I was going to, from now on, do a better job investigating steroids and apply the same strict standards to my HOF voting that I did my reporting.

 

Re: BBWA: Mark McGwire died for your sins

Steroids weren't against the rules, but they were against the law. Hey, why the heck did the NFL suspend Odell Thurman? He didn't violate any NFL rules.