Aug 8, 2005

MSM, Sports Division and baseball doping

I suppose it's inevitable that Congress will get more involved in the steroid scandal now that Rafael Palmeiro has tested positive and can add lying to Congress to his list of probable misdeeds.

But really, I hate the fact that Congress stuck their collective nose into this issue.

You can blame the steroid scandal on MLB and the individual players who used the stuff but I'm gonna add a third culprit to the list: Mainstream Media, Sports Division.

Steroids have been the invisible elephant in the living room of baseball at least since Mark McGwire broke Roger Maris' HR record in 1998. As McGwire was approaching the record, the story broke about his use of androstenedione. McGwire then announced that he was stopping the practice and business went on as usual. Yet McGwire's embarrassing testimony before Congress, indicates that andro probably wasn't the only reason the formerly injury-prone McGwire was able to break the HR record.

But the biggest elephant of them all is Barry Bonds. Anyone who's crossed the threshhold of 35 knows that you just don't get bigger and stronger with age--no matter how hard you work out. But Barry Bonds did. But when Bonds broke the HR record in 2001, virtually no one questioned it; sportswriters were too busy gushing over the record. They still are.

Everybody knew about Bonds' relationship with his trainer, Greg Anderson. Hell, Bonds thanked the guy the night he broke the record. How difficult would it have been to dig a little deeper into Bonds' training regimen?

Seems to me all the records for the past 10 years or so ought to have asterisks attached to them.

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