A-Roid or A-Fraud?
Its not like we should be surprised by Saturday’s revelation that A-Rod is a cheater. Given that he reportedly came clean this afternoon with Peter Gammons, he deserves more credit than any of the players previously caught using steroids or most of the writers who have jumped all over him in the past two days.
Anyone who was involved with baseball during the “steroids era”, including players, management, the Players Association and the baseball media, are to blame for the situation. A-Rod’s three seasons worth of steroid usage, while bringing further unwanted attention to the situation, did not make or break the public perception of this continuous scandal.
While the ancillary parties were not the ones injecting themselves with banned substances their propensity to turn a blind-eye, and failure to enforce any reasonable interpretation of the laws of the United States or the rules of Major League Baseball is tantamount to collusion to the offense.
The Players Association has handled this situation poorly at every possible turn. By shortsightedly following the interest of players in the immediate spotlight it has failed to look after the best interest of ALL of its constituents. In a round table discussion on Sunday morning on MLBTV Harold Reynolds stated that the Players Association has always catered to the needs of its wealthiest members. While this is not particularly surprising, Reynolds described a system where journeymen and players on the lower levels of the salary structure felt obligated and pressured to support the best interests of the games highest paid players. The same type of confusion as to its mission led the Association to so vociferously fight against any type of regulation or implementation of rules outlawing the use of PEDs and has thus led the league into its current predicament. The Union’s general failure was manifested again when Gene Orza reportedly attempted to cover up the exact number of guilty players in 2003 in order to thwart new testing policies (H/T: Shyster Ball.) This continued behavior by the Major League Players Association has significantly hurt baseball players reputations and ability to honestly do their job.
This is not to say that Baseball or the Yankees as we know them are going to end as Jason Stark, Tim Kurkjian and the majority of New York’s sports media would have you belief. The surprise and outrage of these ‘journalists’ is reactionary hypocrisy of the worst order. It was these writers who failed to ask questions about the rates in which balls were flying out of parks in the late-1990s, it was these writers who never called for any substantive investigations or change and it was these writers who anointed A-Rod the savior to Barry Bonds’ tainted record without any evidence to support their claims. To suggest that a 24 year old A-Rod was responsible for destroying baseball when men over a decade older than him had been taking advantage of the same loopholes for fifteen years is hyperbole to the extreme.
At the same time writers, such as Steve Hulkower, who flippantly try to dismiss A-Rod’s actions as being minor, unquantifiable and irrelevant, or as an example of aesthetic vanity are doing the issue an even greater injustice. With A-Rod, the steroids are reportedly were present during three of his prime and thus relatively unquantifiable in comparison to Barry Bonds whose career was on a downward slope before he supposedly started juicing. Just because we are unable to tell exactly how much A-Rod benefited, and how many home runs he would have hit without the juice, does not mean to say that there was no benefit.
With Bonds, the performance increase was so staggering relative to his decline, we have a better idea of the extent of how much he benefited. Bonds had five of his six best years in terms of home run production following a four-year decline in his power production. Would the slope of his decline have naturally trended down gently or would it have had a year of two of average (approximately 33 home runs/ year) or above-average production no one can say at this point. What we can say is that if Bonds had averaged 33 home runs a year until he broke Hank Aaron’s record he would have had to play at that level until the age of 44 (next season). Steroids, particularly HGH, have the reported ability to help a player recover from workouts and injuries, an affect of increased importance for a player looking to prolong his career. Bonds’ body likely eventually broke down because of his steroids use, but the odds are that he would have broken down even sooner without it.
Alex Rodriguez and Barry Bonds are two of the games greatest players regardless of whether or not they took steroids. One of Tim Kurkjian’s arguments in the past two days has been that voters have demonstrated that they will not vote for steroid users. This incredibly small sample size essentially refers to Mark McGwire who was never going to be a sure thing first ballot Hall of Famer without allegations of steroids usage. While Rodriguez and Bonds have certainly sullied both the reputation of baseball and their own personal reputations, they will still go down as two of the best players of all time. Steroids were relevant in the performance of both individuals but they could not have reached their relative levels of success without being two of the premier players in the game’s history. Kurkjian may be right when he says that they will never make the Hall, but it would be a monumental shame.
Then again, if this had not happened, I probably wouldn’t be so relaxed about all of this.
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