I break my long silence on steroids

Peter Gammons – the best baseball journalist alive, and maybe the best ever, though we should caveat that by saying that this is the steroid era – had a conversation with Alex Rodriguez at ARod’s home this winter, after word got out that Rodriguez had tested positive for performance-enhancing drugs in 2003, and was on The List of 105 players who had done so, in the Mitchell Report. Gammons reports that Rodriguez told him “you know, now that it’s out, I almost feel relieved.”

It's time to stop this nonsense and out everyone.

I am perplexed by the reaction to yesterday’s revelation that Big Papi has been caught juicing. Journalists and fans are acting as if baseball players are entitled to a presumption of innocence until there is some hard evidence that they used steroids, as if the court of public opinion in the arena of sports is subject to the same rules as the actual criminal justice system. “Innocent until proven guilty” applies to baseball sluggers in the late 1990’s and early 2000’s about as much as “free speech” applied to John Rocker.

In society at large, we grant those protections because we’re playing with live ammunition. These are the rules that provide for a free and fair society, such as we have. But baseball is a game, and fairness comes by a different standard. So I say this: People – they were all using steroids. Those who pound their chests and wail about the fall of Big Papi are either disingenuous, or have been willfully naïve, or are kidding themselves about who else is on The List, or are simply using the public revelation of each individual on The List as a heuristic for actually being on The List, which is stupid. Really stupid. They were under-reacting then, and they are over-reacting now. Dan Shaughnessey, I'm looking at you. You suck, Dan Shaughnessey. You really suck.

Do you know why I hate the fact that steroid use has now obviously been so pervasive? It’s because the numbers 714 and then 755, and 60 and then 61, were so hallowed for so long, but now I can’t even tell you how many home runs Barry Bonds has over his career without looking, and I don’t give a rat’s ass that he hit 73 in a season. (It’s 73, right?) Baseball records have always been special – mythical, hallowed. Heroic individual performance in the midst of a team effort has been a hallmark of our special American pastime. And steroids has ruined that, for now. As a Red Sox fan, I love to hate ARod, but the reason I was upset to learn he tested positive was that I had hoped he could set things right again and give us a clean career home run record.

But as integral as individual accomplishments are to the gestalt of the game, they are not the most important thing. The game is about winning championships. The game is supposed to be contested by the rules, and when the rules are not followed, we feel that the outcome is tainted. But it’s important at this moment to note the different levels of tainting that can be achieved. When the rules are not followed to the benefit of one team and the detriment of another, that’s some pretty serious tainting. When the rules are not followed more or less universally, though, the tainting is less severe. And that’s what we have here. As George Mitchell himself has said, there aint no team that isn’t implicated by The List.

If you watched the 2004 American League Championship Series between the Red Sox and the Yankees, you know it was a gift. It was perfection in sports. Does it tarnish and sadden that great memory to know that some players on both sides were cheating? Yes, a little bit, it does. But what happened happened; I watched it, and I felt it. The Red Sox were as low as you can be, in the deepest hole you can be in in sports, and they faced impossible odds and won. That is mostly everything that matters.

I love sports – no, I like sports; I love baseball and I live by the Red Sox – but it is a game. It is what we feel when we watch it. It is a comeback win at Fenway Park. The memory of it is nice. The experience of it is sublime.

What’s important now is to get clean:
1) Release The List all at once;
2) Test everyone all the time;
3) Please, idiot baseball players, just say this:

“I used steroids, as is now clear to everyone. It was wrong, and I wish I hadn’t done it.

“To my younger fans, let me just say this: if you become a major leaguer and hit a home run in the World Series, or if you just only ever get one hit in little league, try, on the field as in life, to take satisfaction from doing your best, from having fun in the process, and from accepting and learning from the result. Don’t take steroids. Know what you’re putting into your body. Take responsibility for knowing the difference between right and wrong. Play the game by the rules. And maybe most importantly, when you make a mistake, own up to it and learn from it.

“I didn’t follow that advice. I hurt the game of baseball, and I lied to you. I can’t undo that. All I can do is promise to get it right in the future, and argue for the strictest possible testing program for all professional baseball players. I screwed up. No excuses. I’m going to learn from it, and move on, and baseball will too.”