Will The Steroid Issue Go Government Someday?

January 20, 2007

We all know that baseball fans are sick and tired hearing that the cream of the crop of 1980-2000 baseball players has been using various legal, illegal, and once legal but now illegal drugs.

Football fans have gotten used to this. “Everybody” took ‘greenies’, concussions were called “headaches” and cortisone shots before game time was as common as Gatorade.

But, for some reason, taking anything from steroids to aspirin just doesn’t hack it for the baseball fans in general, and the Hall of Fame voters in particular.

Now, I understand that the San Francisco Giants are trying to get out of the contract they promised Barry Bonds. Sammy Sosa can’t get anyone to offer him more than a $500,000 minor league contract, Rafael Palmeiro can’t get anyone to offer him anything, and Mark McGwire’s lack of HOF votes was a total embarrassment to his entire career.

Add to that the fact that former Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell warned baseball owners yesterday that a lack of cooperation with his investigation into steroid use will “significantly increase” the chances of government involvement.

Mitchell added: “If nothing else, the results of the Hall of Fame voting last week, and the reaction to it, offer fresh evidence that this issue will not just fade away.
Whether you think it fair or not, whether you think it justified or not, Major League Baseball has a cloud over its head, and that cloud will not just go away.
It won’t go away because the issues are so serious.”

I continue to try and determine who really hit the most home runs in one year. Was it McGwire, or Sosa, or Bobby Bonds favorite son, Barry? Frankly, I’m still having problems starting with the day the baseball schedule went from 154 games a year to 162. Roger Maris the home run king? No way.

What confuses this even more is the fact that Mark McGwire has admitted to taking stimulants that were on the right side of the baseball law when he took them. How is something wrong if it’s legal? (Don’t answer that…)

If Shoeless Joe Jackson drank Coca-Cola, when cocaine was still in the original formula, and never bet on baseball, and made the Hall of Fame, and then cocaine was made illegal…

I’m getting a headache.