In Other News, It’s Cold When the Temperature is Below Zero

I realize this hardly made any headlines, so you may not have heard that Mark McGwire, former holder of the Most Home Runs in a Season record in Major League Baseball, admitted that he took steroids.

In full disclosure, I’ve taken steroids a few times in my life. Of course, these were prescribed by a doctor, picked up at a pharmacy out in the public. There is nothing illegal about that. (It didn’t stop my friends from harassing me that I had a 50-game baseball suspension, though.)

This is something people have “known” for years, without really knowing it. Mark McGwire claims that steroids
didn’t help him hit home runs and he could’ve done it without steroids. Steroids merely helped him with his injuries, as he was, “A walking M*A*S*H unit.”

In a small way, he’s right. From my vague understanding of the human body (the last time I took a health class was almost 20 years ago, and I’ll admit now that I don’t even remember attending health class my sophomore year of high school. The only reason I know I did is because it was a required class, and I didn’t indiscriminately skip classes), this is what I know. Steroids do not, in themselves, make you stronger. Steroids merely help your muscles recover faster. If I were to simply take steroids, and change no other part of my daily routine, I would have the side effects of steroids but I wouldn’t be bulking on muscles. If I were a gym rat, I would be able to bulk up some muscle, because the muscles would help me recover faster.

Hitting home runs takes an amazing amount of talent, not just related to strength. It doesn’t matter how many steroids I take for strength-building purposes, I will not be able to hit a home run. I have the eye-hand coordination of an infant when it comes to hitting a baseball (or playing video games, but that’s another story for another time). I can’t hit a baseball in general, so adding strength won’t help me hit it at all. The baseball players can already hit a baseball, by default (except Corky “Corky” Miller). Adding strength only helps them hit it further. Adding steroids allows the muscles to recover faster, so they can exercise more and get stronger.

Mark McGwire believes he could’ve hit 70 home runs in a season without steroids. Maybe he’s right, but I disagree. Based on the above, we know that steroids didn’t help him hit the ball. It probably helped him build the strength to hit the ball farther, or at least recover strength to hit the ball farther more often. Beyond that, by his own admission, he was so injured, he needed the steroids to stay on the field. If he couldn’t stay healthy for a season without steroids, why does he think he could have hit 70 home runs without them? Injuries and strength are part of the game. Those who are “fragile” players (oft-injured) generally don’t last long in the game. Joe Crede’s career may be over at age 32 due to injuries. It’s a sad factor of life.

In short, I believe that Mark McGwire has deluded himself. He feels guilty about taking steroids, because he knows it was wrong. He’s only half-right when he says it didn’t help him hit home runs, and he could’ve done it without steroids. He had the eye-hand coordination and reaction times to hit a baseball. He even had the power to hit the ball very, very far. He just lacked the strength to do it as often as he did, so he took steroids. He only wants to concentrate on half the story.

We can all believe what we want. If it helps him sleep at night, great. If it convinces some kids that there’s no point to taking steroids, even better.

Timberwolves update: They have a 1-3 record since I last reported. They’re now at 8-32, or a 20.0% winning percentage. The have the worst record in the West, but New Jersey has the worst record, 3-35.

Wild Update: The Wild have a 24-20-3 record, for a 51.1% winning percentage. They were also in a few fights last night.

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.!

Suspended

I’m on the DL. I’m questionable. I’m on the IR. Whatever you want to call it, I managed to astutely slice open the fingers on my left hand, requiring a trip to urgent care for six stitches and a tetanus shot. I can still type—fortunately—but it’s just not as easy as it normally is.

MLB Commissioner Bud Selig brought up the fact that players who are suspended get to spend time in the minors, re-habbing, if you will, for their return to their major league team. He wanted to eliminate that. Now, I don’t often agree with Bud Selig. I don’t think he does a good job with costumer service—I have no idea how the players feel about him, and have no way of finding out. (They’re probably not going to admit if they hate him, which makes it hard to tell if they’re telling the truth when they say they like him.) However, on this case, I agree.

A player who is suspended does get punished: he doesn’t get paid his salary for the duration of his suspension. And yet, he’s able to get back into game condition from the time he finishes his suspension. He doesn’t come back to the team as if he’s been gone for 50 (or whatever) days. He comes back with his timing down for hitting or his control of his pitches in game situations. With players who make insane salaries, the punishment of pay is less of a punishment as it is a slap. Sure, they miss it, but it’s not like a huge loss to their fortunes, unless they’re been excessively undisciplined in their spending.

I’m well in favor of the suspended player being replaced on the team. (Part of me wonders how much it would affect the teammates if the player either had to be released/exposed to waivers when suspended—or else be left a member of the active roster. I would like to think that players would be more responsible about not taking steroids/abusing drugs because they’d not only hurt themselves, but their teams. However, most guys who behave poorly will still assume they won’t get caught. And I hate the concept of punishing other people for another’s sins.) But I do think that before a player can play in the minors on a suspension-related issue, he should go through the same process as if he had been sent down to the minors: exposed to waivers. This makes it more difficult for the player to get back into the game—which is the exact sort of punishment that’s going to annoy him the most. These guys are competitors. They don’t want to sit on the bench. And if they don’t have the time to get back into game condition in the minors, it will be harder for them to get into games in the majors.

Because of human nature, the odds of stopping steroid abuse are very low (science will keep working on both sides: creating steroids that aren’t detectable, and creating tests to detect them). Thus, it’s likely there will always be players getting caught. There should be a plan to deal with them—the stricter the punishment, the more of a deterrent it will be. But it will never be 100%.

Drugs

It always surprises me when athletes are caught taking drugs. Of course, we've heard the A-Rod allegations so much that we're immune. We know he took them for a few years--he admitted that far. Now people are coming out of the woodwork to claim he took them in high school, when he was with the Yankees (he only admitted taking them during the Texas Rangers years). I don't know if he did or not. Until I get proof, medical or admission of guilt, I'm not going to worry about it.

And now the news comes out that Manny Ramirez has been suspended for 50 games for violation of MLB drug policy. He said it's not a steroid, but rather something that was prescribed by a doctor for a personal medical issue.

"Recently I saw a physician for a personal health issue. He gave me a medication, not a steroid, which he thought was OK to give me," Ramirez said. "Unfortunately, the medication was banned under our drug policy. Under the policy that mistake is now my responsibility."

This is short and sweet, but really? I know this has happened before: not necessarily with a prescription, but with supplements from health stores and such. Someone needs to remind these guys that everything they take should be taken to MLB to assure that it's okay. Just because it's given by a doctor, or sold over the counter, check with MLB. Just because someone unrelated to MLB says it should be okay, check it out. It never hurts to take precautions. (I'm fairly certian that MLB makes exceptions for medical drugs--they'd almost have to!--as long as they're disclosed.)

Ends Justifies the Means...

If there’s one thing I’ve learned from MLB the past few years, it’s that the ends justify the means. Or at least that’s what I’ve learned from A-Rod, Andy Pettite, Barry Bonds, and Roger Clemens.

Two of the four have admitted to steroid use, and the other two deny it, but there’s so much evidence that it’s hard to believe them.

Rodriguez said he wanted the competitive edge. He wanted to be able to live up to the rich contract he signed with the Rangers after abandoning Seattle. In a small way, I feel sorry for him. There is pressure to live up to expectations. He was in a very public role. However, does the ends justify the means? He certainly lived up to the expectations of the public at the time, but now what? Now they’re looking back, and feel like they were cheated out of a real player. Instead, they got a non-human performance.

Then again, where are you going to draw the line? Many athletes get eye surgery to give them better vision than they naturally have. This is an advantage to them in sports. Tommy John often replaces a torn ligament with a much stronger ligament, enabling some pitchers to actually throw harder than they did pre-surgery. Tommy John is a bit of a risk, though, because not every pitcher makes it back. (The difference, of course, is that as far as has been studied, there are no long term negative effects to these surgeries; whereas, the long-term effects of steroids have been studied.)

Steroids are not bad. People take steroids quite often. The cortisone shot that so many get to relieve pain is a steroid. Many asthmatics take steroids--that’s what’s in the inhalers (I’m uncertain if there are any athletes in this situation). Premature infants are given steroids in the hospital to help lung development. Granted, these steroids are taken openly under the watch of a doctor as opposed to behind closed doors for no medical necessity.

I’m being a little facetious here; there are different types of steroids. Steroids, unchecked, have long-term affects. The players who take steroids are giving themselves an unfair advantage (although wouldn’t you say being born with athletic talent is an unfair advantage, too?). If left unchecked, this will grow, until players need to take steroids in order to compete. And the more athletes that take steroids to compete, the more teens that will take steroids to be considered good enough to be drafted and pretty soon parents will have to give their toddlers steroids. Leave it to me to take things to an over-dramatic extreme! However, the more professionals that take steroids, the more teens/college athletes will feel pressured to do so.

The ends do not justify the means, unless the means are justified by themselves.

Timberwolves update: 20-48 (1-3 since last time, 16-33 since McHale).

Marian Gaborik Injury Status: He’s skated some practices with the team, but is still a ways off according to coaches. I’m betting he doesn’t play for Minnesota again.

Joe Mauer Injury Status: Latest rumors are that his back problems are not serious, but he has yet to take part in baseball activities, so take that for what it’s worth.

These two guys are going to help shape baseball?

Over the past couple of weeks, we've been presented with news of players testifying against former teammates. These men will help mold our historical perspective on the late 80s and 90s. One is a pitcher, one a catcher. The pitcher will testify against Clemens, because he trained with he and Pettite. This pitcher was C.J. Nitkowski, he of the 5.37 lifetime ERA.
The catcher will be testifying against Barry Bonds. This catcher, Bobby Estalella will be most remembered for testifying againts Barry Bonds, probably not his career .216 average.
But these two mediocre players are going to be involved in defining the legacy of two of the greatest players of all time.