Makin' a list, checkin' it twice

You’re on a sports blog. Can I presume every single one of you knows that in 2003, Major League baseball gave steroids tests to all teams’ 40-man rosters? All results were confidential, and if very few players were caught, MLB would not have instituted random drug testing. Unsurprisingly, but sadly, 103 players returned positive results. Random drug testing was instituted, and a handful of players have been caught. (Does anyone think the players are taking less steroids? Not really. It’s presumed they’re taking steroids that are undectable/untestable.) The tests were supposed to be confidential. However, once the government got involved with the steroids issue, things started going awry.

Slowly, the names have been leaking out. There was Alex Rodriguez. Recently David Ortiz and Manny Ramirez were named as allegedly being on the list.

There are 30 teams in baseball. The 40-man rosters are the 25 Major League players and 15 protected players—presumed to be the most likely to make the majors sooner (as opposed to far in the future or never). That’s 1,200 players.

There is grumbling about these names being leaked. The tests were confidential, so I was in favor of leaving them that way (I mean, as a fan of the game and a believer in the purity of the sport, I want to know who’s ruining it, but as a fan of fair play, they players were promised confidentiality, so I accepted that as the right thing). Now that a few names have been leaked, I think it’s time to release the full list of names.

Part of me wants to know, because I’m curious, but part of me really doesn’t want to know because it will be sad.

103 people means 2 ½ teams, if the incidents were limited to teams. That’s equivalent to four major league teams. While it wouldn’t surprise me to find that some teams end up with higher representation than others (I’m not speculating here: Clumping is part of statistics), I would guess no team was entirely untouched—as much as we might think our home teams were “clean”, they weren’t. I think seeing the names on a list will help fans understand how wide-spread the problem is. Once we see how wide-spread it is, the sooner the big-named players who are implicated can get on with playing baseball, and the sooner we can get over this era in baseball. At first, Alex Rodriguez was out there by himself. Now Manny and Ortiz are joining him.

This doesn’t make me accept what they did any better. Just because all your friends jumped off bridges doesn’t mean that your Mom won’t be upset when you do it, too.

The implicated players will have an uphill climb to gain the respect of fans again, but perhaps that’s how it should be. They were doing something illegal, and likely gained some benefit from it (even though we’ll probably find a fair share of steroid users who were busts or mediocre players—those who were led to steroids to give them an edge where they didn’t have the ability). They need to face the consequences.

Speaking of that, where should these guys sit in the book of records? I’m not sure. There was a time before 2003 where players may have taken steroids but not been caught, because not everyone was tested. If you don’t admit it, and weren’t caught, no one will know. How far back was it a problem? No one knows. I think we’re going to have to leave the lists where they are. Anyone who really cares will look at history and see Sosa, Bonds, and McGwire’s names listed in the steroid scandal, and look back and find Roger Maris. Babe Ruth has been ousted in his home run hitting records by many people, and we still remember him. The steroids era happened. We can’t completely cleanse it from baseball. We simply need to leave it behind, as the black mark in history.

Give us the names. Let us grieve over the lost innocence of the sport. We will learn to accept the past, and move forward with the—hopefully clean—future.

For those of you a little hungry, head on down to the new stadium of the Dallas Cowboy’s, where you can get a pizza for the incredibly low price of $90! Hurry! Offer is limited to those with a luxury box, which is a bargain at $800,000 not including tickets.!