With every passing day, it is harder and harder to let the “steroid boys” slide. The most recent evidence presented that Barry Bonds used steroids isn’t exactly a surprise to anyone, but it could be a smoking gun that throws a real taint over everything that he has accomplished, not to mention what McGwire, Sosa, Giambi, Palmeiro, and Sheffield -- as well as countless others -- have accomplished in their careers. Simply put, the numbers are artificial. They are not part of the game the way it was meant to be played, and they are an injustice to all of the greats who have played the game before them.
Babe Ruth and Hank Aaron earned every one of their records, so did Roger Maris, along with pretty much every member of the 500 home run club, and all of the Hall of Famers. Now Barry’s body armor can’t protect him, nor can his claims of innocence. It’s garbage, pure and simple, and he’s been caught both cheating and lying about steroid use.
Hopefully that puts an end to one of baseball’s most dishonest eras. Champions of these players often argue that what they did was not illegal and that baseball didn’t have a ban on these substances when they were being used. That’s rationalization, pure and simple; steroids are not available over the counter, steroids need to be obtained either legally from a doctor, or illegally from someone who’s committing a crime by selling them, and it’s safe to say that these players didn’t have a stack of prescriptions on file at the local pharmacy.
They were buying an illegal substance and, unless you want to believe that these multimillionaires didn’t have the brains to realize they were buying an illegal performance enhancer, you can’t rationalize away what they’ve done.
What they’ve done is taint the game. Yeah, we’re over it, and hopefully it’s behind us, but this will be the first year that one of the known steroid users is up for induction into the Hall of Fame. "Big Mac" Mark McGwire will be eligible, and he doesn’t deserve to be. It hurts a little to say that, since his home run tear and his competition with Sammy Sosa back in the 90’s helped bring the game to fever pitch and elevate the audience. But his numbers are tainted; Roger Maris is still -- to me and many others -- the true single season home run king. Maris isn’t in the Hall of Fame and Mac doesn’t deserve to be.
Maris, for many years, had to deal with an asterisk next to his record of 61 home runs in a season, because he did it in a season where more games were played than Babe Ruth had in his record breaking season. It took many years before that asterisk was removed and Maris got the credit he deserved.
Maybe it’s time to bring back the asterisk. Slap it behind every single record held by any player who has been proven to have used steroids, be it for home runs or strikeouts as a batter. Attaching the asterisk would be a more than fair indication that the records are not an honest comparison to records of players past, and players yet to reach the Bigs. It’s a stigma these players have all earned. Especially those who said to our face, time and time again, that they never intentionally used steroids.
How these records are looked at by future generations depends a lot on how we look at these players now. The easiest thing would be to shrug and say it’s all well and done and that we can’t tell which players really used and which ones didn’t. It’s not the most honest thing though – sure there are players who’ve never been caught, sure there are those we suspect of cheating, but there are also those we know cheated, maybe once, maybe twice, maybe in an ongoing fashion. Make those players wear their shame forever – they tainted the integrity of the game. We can’t undo the home runs, we can’t undo the victories and records attained by the users. We can take away some of the reward, label them as cheaters – in the record books. Right Now.
Baseball has a history of sweeping scandals under the rug or trying to. For every scandal we’ve heard of there are at least a handful which have been buried. This one, like the Black Sox, or Pete Rose scandal has compromised the integrity of the game. The real question is if we let it taint the record books and statistics of the game, or if we close our eyes and pretend that these athletes were just that much better than the rest of them?
If
we do, that would be a shame, and baseball should stop caring
about its integrity.
