Kindred: How he and others missed/ignored the real McGwire story

I'm not sure a lack of hard evidence ever stopped to many columnists from raising an (skeptical) opinion.



As I stated on the other thread ... I can not see how after admitting he cheated you and anyone other BWAA can vote him in the HOF.
I can't for the life of me understand there can be a justification rewarding (and that's the HOF is - a reward) he and others for cheating.

 

Did anyone raise any flags a few years earlier with Brady Anderson and with Mickey Tettleton and his Fruit Loops story, circa 1989?

 

The guy who looks really bad is Tom Verducci. Blowing the lid off the PED issue in 2002 SI story and marveling about ageless wonder Roger Clemens in a 2003 SI Story that outlined Clemens training regimen.
Story included quotes from Clemens trainer -- Brian Mcnamee.

How possibly could Verducci not suspect that Clemens success was due to PED's?

 

Clemens body really didn't change all the much, did it? He was always stocky like that. I still don't think he ever took anything. I think McNamee was just a good trainer who made him think he was taking stuff and needing to work out to get the full effect, when it was all just a placebo.

 

Also, weight training technology, techniques and knowledge about nutrition have gotten multifold better since Maris' time. And ballparks smaller, tighter baseball, diluted pitching...why would one take it as an article of faith then that players were using illegal PEDs to reach such home run totals? Without a smoking gun....and no, not just the physiques, which I explained above....it would have been irresponsible to fling shit against the wall. Now, the media culture is to fling shit hourly, claim big scoops and don't talk about the vast majority of not-panning-outedness.

 

Here is an interesting, I think, follow up to this issue -- Are we willfully ignoring the very same issue in the NFL? Right now?

It seems obvious that we are. And no one really cares. I think, for the most part, they'd just be pissed off if someone tried to dig really deep into the steroids issue in football. The NFL obviously has testing procedures that MLB did not, but I think so many of us are on the same magic fun bus ride with football, we either need to stop complaining about baseball and what we didn't see, accept that roids are a permanant part of sports culture, or start getting serious about the cartoon characters filling up our television on Sundays.

 

But how subjective are Halls of Fame, anyway? Is everyone in the MLB HOF truly a saint? The Pro Football HOF? Who's the know what the hell really went on? Much like the 90s may have been the Steroid Era, the 1980s were the coke period. If Dock Ellis could throw a no-hitter on acid, what the hell was going on in the clubhouses of the 1960s and 1970s?

We're never going to know what really happened in those eras. Hell, it may come out nearly everyone cheated during the roid era. What do you do then??

 

Sorry, Jay...bad comparison.

McGwire juiced to gain a competitive edge.

Tiger slept around. Even if people had known more, what the hell were they going to write about that? How did that affect golf?

I'm not one of these people who say his personal life still doesn't matter. This story has gotten way too big, the depth of his infidelity is staggering, and now it's a divorce story and it's keeping him off the tour and it's affecting the game as whole, including big economic ramifications.

But until it became so important that it affected the sport, who was going to write that story? And how would they possibly know unless they followed him around?

Infidelity has still not yet become a story regular newspaper reporters report. Nor should they until it expands beyond straight personal life.

 

Pro football kind of has a rough, hardscrabble, rebel iconography. Baseball is Field of Dreams; Willie, Mickey and the Duke, sitting around the radio with Dad. That's the difference, I think. DD. Football fans just don't care; they just like what happens on the field. Baseball fans seek a purity that has never been there. Plus, football has nothing equal to the sacredness of the home run records.

 

I agree with everything you're saying, but it only makes me more annoyed with how seriously baseball takes itself. Any time I hear the word "sacred" and "purity" in reference to baseball, its past or its records, I want to puke up a basket full of horse muffins.

 

Ehhh... Court papers, schmort papers.

I think for a huge story to break open, you need 3 major elements: A "black sheep"- type reporter who doesn't give an F what anybody thinks, someone in management who will back that reporter at all costs, and luck.

That's what they had with Watergate. That's what the Game of Shadows guys had. When those 3 stars don't align, you've got no story.

 

And they had court papers that, by distributive property, they shouldn't have had. Probably the most important part.