Zell's Pinstripe Blog

Day to day, the thread that binds together our belief that baseball is in some way “clean” is being pulled from the quilt, and piece by piece the tape is stripped from the rose colored wrapping that now only partially covers the box that is professional sports. Now that the clutchiest hitter in Red Sox history has been outed (along with his partner in crime) you’ll hear lots of shouts of hypocrisy towards Red Sox Nation, and calls of tainted championships in 2004 and 2007.

Jason Rosenberg, founder of It Is About The Money, Stupid, suggests that the schadenfreude induced euphoria currently in effect amongst the Yankees’ faithful is misplaced, and that this can only be described as “another gut-punch to baseball”.

I’ve got another take on it. This isn’t a gut-punch, if only because it was so obvious beforehand. At this point, to ignore the tell-tale signs throughout professional sports is simply willful ignorance. If you’ve got a few minutes, go read the article penned on A-Rod a few months back. Remember, those 103 names in 2003? They were the players taking traceable steroids-the stuff that MLB has been able to find. What about the numerous drugs that MLB can’t test for, beginning with HGH, and ending with the really up to date designer stuff?

And here’s my biggest issue with this whole subject. Where do we draw the line between performance enhancing drugs and performance enhancing supplements? Creatine has been proven do some awful stuff to a kid’s body, yet it’s not on the banned substance list. Caffeine isn’t exactly a cure-all either.

At some point, this starts to look like the difference between drugs (for instance, marijuana) and nicotine/alcohol. Don’t get me wrong–those are not equivalent substances, and anyone putting heroine in their body might as well just go the full distance and move to arsenic–but why are alcohol and nicotine, which do terrible things to us, more legal than weed?

I understand the argument that clean players shouldn’t have to take steroids, and thereby screw themselves up, to keep up with the cheaters. But I fail to feel that bad for the guys who are complaining that they’re only making a few million a year because their juicing opponents are sopping up all the cash.

I do feel for the minor leaguers who are on the cusp of moving from the $40,000 minor leagues to the $450,000 major leagues, but can’t quite make the jump because other kids around their level are juicing up. But then again, who says anyone is entitled to a $450,000 job? I’m not saying that’s a good thing, just that it’s our reality, and we’d do best to deal with it. Life’s tough all around, and you can find people complaining about fairness in every industry, from business women beneath the glass ceiling, to minorities getting screwed in the voting process, to the GBLT community struggling for acceptance (and equality). I just see this as proof that baseball, along with other professional sports, is subject to the same vagaries of the human condition as every other aspect of our lives. And that shouldn’t be nearly so surprising as make it seem.