Selig might reinstate Aaron as HR king.

Aaron broke the home run record at a time when steroid use was so rampant in baseball that Congress considered investigating it. He's had at least one teammate on the record saying that a large portion of his team was juicing.

He was a slugger who had his best power years late in his 30s, well beyond when normal aging should have kicked in.

There was no testing back then, so we'll never know for sure, but if you want to remove suspicion, you'll need to go back a lot further.

 

If Obama came out and said something off the wall, "I might bomb France tomorrow" ... don't you think that'd be worth reporting? Just the fact, you know, he said that ...

The commissioner says he might remove the most hallowed record from the record book ... that's a fucking story. Even if there's a snowball's chance in hell of it happening. You can point out there's no chance in hell that it's happening. But if Selig makes such a pronouncement ... just the fact that he made it is a story.

And, yes, in this instance ... I want to see the quote.

 

Anytime anyone brings up an "if" you guys shout it down as a strawman argument.


But you really expect me to believe that if someone you didn't agree with said they were considering, oh I don't know, eliminating the department of homeland security (even though you know it couldn't/wouldn't happen) that you would just make that a brief. And yes, obviously the nation's security and a fucking sports record aren't the same thing. But your argument is if you don't trust someone, then their prospective decisions aren't worth covering is a joke.

 

Problem is, that's exactly what he would be doing here.

If steroids were such a problem in the NFL (1970s Steelers, Raiders, etc.) and elsewhere (Schwarzenegger) before the steroids era, is it such a stretch to think guys like Nolan Ryan might have provided the blueprint for guys like Clemens? You either have to accept all of the numbers or none. To pick and choose would be the worst thing Selig can do, which means he would probably do it.

 

IJAG,

I think the difference in this case is that Selig has a history dating back to his 1992 coup of Fay Vincent of making hand-wringing statements for PR purposes when he knows darn well he has no ability to carry through with them.

 

Show me any reports, even suspicions, that Maris used steroids in 1961.

This is enough to raise my suspicions as to who lived in the steroids era:

 

cran, I still don't think that means you don't report it. As I posted earlier, then you report that he said it, you recast his "hand-wringing statements" and lack of follow-through, and you show how hard it would be.

But you can't simply ignore that he said this.

 

So we're going to give Maris and that era a pass because a combination of a compliant press and lack of easy testing made it impossible to know which players were using, despite having reports that the use was widespread throughout the league?

Doesn't seem right to me.

 

Just, you're more than a girl. You're a brilliant, on-target woman. Good post.

 

Check out Brady Anderson's yearly homer total some day.

Exact.... same ... thing

Whenever your record-setting HR total is 56 percent higher than your career second-best, that is a big suspicion.

 

Oh, so now it's the press's fault?

Show me a Maris or Aaron that doesn't look more like the examples of the younger trio above and I'll get back to you.

 

I somehow feel worse now.