Baseball’s Great Charade

Boston's slugging duo turns up dirty two rings later

by Sean Heffernan

The use of steroids taints everything baseball has achieved in recent history: The Sosa/McGwire home run race in 1998, Roger Clemens winning the CY Young in 2001, Barry Bonds hitting 73 the same year, Alex Rodriguez record breaking contract with the Yankees, and even the Boston Red Sox’s two World Series championships. When news broke that Manny Ramirez and David Ortiz were on the supposed list of MLB players who tested positive for banned substances in 2003 no one was surprised. ...Ramirez and Ortiz joined the handful of others who have been made public leaving the majority of the list still unknown. Baseball needs to face its sins and just release the rest of the list and deal with consequences. You would think the players who've been clean their entire career would unite in anger over steroids, but that just hasn't been the case. I guess no likes a snitch. Still I think it’s better to deal with everything out in the open than having a few names trickle out every year. Baseball needs to bottom out before it can begin to rebuild itself again.

I hate to say it, but Jose Canseco has been pretty dead on. When you have such a large number of baseball players using steroids you would have to think that the league was aware of it and just turned a blind eye making millions upon millions. The steroid induced Sosa/McGwire race galvanized baseball after the 1994 strike. It made people care about baseball beyond their local teams. And it was a complete farce. Baseball fans were had. Gone are the larger than life ghosts of baseball past that our parents and grandparents talk about. Who will we talk about when we’re old? For today’s baseball fan, it’s not worth investing emotion in a star player when it seems the majority of them took steroids at one time or another. "The Steroids Era" will probably go down as the darkest period in the history of the game. Like those greedy souls who slowly pushed America’s economy over the falls, Major League Baseball soiled our country’s national pastime for the love of money. We’ve learned this decade, be it in our bank accounts or our sports sections, that capitalism if left to its own devise we’ll begin to eat at itself like a snake devouring its own tail. All that is left for baseball-loving Americans to cling to is their hopeful prayers that their team finds a way into October. Lord knows what the baseball Gods are thinking above.