Tag Archives: steroids

Should Major League Baseball allow steroid users into the Hall of Fame? No, Says Sam Smith.

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Part 2 of a series.

How can we honor athletes for cheating and then talk to our children about honesty and integrity with a straight face?

Matt Record’s post yesterday arguing that Major League Baseball should admit steroid users to the Hall of Fame gets a lot of things right. For instance: Ty Cobb? Sub-human PoS, no doubt about it. And Matt could have devoted volumes to the abject malpractice of the sports “journalism” industry during Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa’s pursuit of Roger Maris’s single season homerun record; they chose to ignore what was obviously happening under their noses because the steroid era was good for business, and the less pontificating we her from them now the better.

And what about the ways in which MLB’s apartheid system kept some of the greatest stars of their time out of the league for decades? If anything, Matt doesn’t stomp hard enough here. Babe Ruth was a legendary hitter, but he never had to stand in against Satchel Paige, whom DiMaggio called the best pitcher he ever faced after playing against him in a 1936 exhibition. Read more

The Karma wagon rolls around for Manny: respect the game, Tittie-Boy

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Oh, the sheer deliciousness of it all. Manny Ramirez has been busted for using.

The word is that ManRam didn’t actually use steroids.

However, two sources told ESPN’s T.J. Quinn and Mark Fainaru-Wada that the drug used by Ramirez is HCG — human chorionic gonadotropin. HCG is a women’s fertility drug typically used by steroid users to restart their body’s natural testosterone production as they come off a steroid cycle. It is similar to Clomid, the drug Bonds, Giambi and others used as clients of BALCO.

This may be even sweeter, for a couple of reasons. First, this line: “…typically used by steroid users to restart their body’s natural testosterone production as they come off a steroid cycle.” Outing Manny for roid use would have been great, but the next best thing is the lingering shadow of suspicion that’s bound to follow him around for the rest of his career (and, with luck, well into the latter years of his Hall of Fame eligibility). Read more

Rogues, scandals and the Church of Baseball: S&R honors Babe Ruth

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Walt Whitman once said, “I see great things in baseball. It’s our game, the American game. It will repair our losses and be a blessing to us.” You could look it up. – Annie Savoy

I’ll promise to go easier on drinking and to get to bed earlier, but not for you, fifty thousand dollars, or two-hundred and fifty thousand dollars will I give up women. They’re too much fun. – Babe Ruth

Today is Opening Day for America’s Pastime, and to mark the occasion S&R honors our newest Scrogue, George Herman Ruth. The Bambino. The Sultan of Swat.

The Babe. Read more

Super Bowl provides us with an important teachable moment

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I really have mixed feelings about the outcome of yesterday’s Super Bowl. It was a fantastic game, no matter who you were rooting for, and that’s always nice. Historically a lot of Super Bowls have been yawners.

I wasn’t really pulling for the Giants so much as I was against the Patriots, and that was tough for me, too. See, when you look at how New England does things, they really get a lot right. No prima donnas. We, not me. Brains and teamwork trump individual athleticism. Etc. In essence, they have won by repudiating everything that’s wrong about sports in this day and age. They’re the San Antonio Spurs of the NFL.

As an old-school guy who was raised by an even older-school grandfather, this matters to me. Read more

Summer of scandal and the death of sport?

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I love sports. Always have. I grew up playing all the usual sports and eagerly tried out a lot of others when I got older. I’ve always been a big spectator, too, watching everything from football, basketball and baseball to soccer, track, cycling, volleyball, water polo – whatever was on, you know?

But these days I watch less sports than at any point in my life, and it seems likely that this downward trend is going to continue. The why is pretty simple. I was raised old school by a grandfather who grew up playing through the Depression. People who knew him back then and saw him play said that under different circumstances he might have been good enough to play in the Bigs. Maybe. Hard to say, because the hard realities of life intruded on the dreams of many in his generation. So he wound up working for a few dollars a week and playing ball on the weekends.

There was a right way and a wrong way to play. Hard, but fair. Sportsmanship mattered. Read more

Taking Out the Trash, 7.7.07: Of gladiators and porn stars…

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Welcome to the first installment of Taking Out the Trash, a new feature where I pander to the lowest common denominator and wallow shamelessly in the seething much that is our popular culture. If we offend, give us your hands. If we fail, let me know and I’ll try harder next time. And now, on to the show.

Item: Michael Vick is either a pit bull fighter or the dumbest man who ever lived. Possibly both. Vick’s property, which was apparently being occupied by relatives,

was used as the “main staging area for housing and training the pit bulls involved” in a dogfighting operation, according to the court papers.The documents contend prize money from the dogfighting climbed into the thousands of dollars, people came from as far away as Texas and sheepish pit bulls were killed. Read more