We already knew this. What still makes me mad is that he won the 2011 MVP over Matt Kemp. That was the same year he tested positive for steroids and got away with it. I'm glad the truth has finally come out. What I want more than anything is the truth. Unfortunately, there are a lot of players that used steroids that we'll never know about for sure. And there were clean players that played in the steroid era that are tainted because of when they played.
Let's take one player that I've thought about a lot, Fred McGriff. Maybe I'm wrong, but I think he was clean. He's getting no Hall of Fame consideration, but if he was clean, he belongs in the Hall of Fame. When he was playing, I didn't think of him as a Hall of Famer because his numbers were dwarfed by several other players. But most of those guys were cheating. If he hadn't played with cheaters, his 493 career home runs would jump out at you. You know who else had 493 career home runs? One of the greatest hitters of all time.
Major League Baseball still has a problem. They've taken steps in the right direction. Look at some of these numbers. In 2001, the top ten home run hitters combined for 526 home runs (if you're checking my math, three guys tied for 10th place, so only add 41 once if you're counting just 10 players). Last year, the top ten home run hitters combined for 396 home runs. Baseball has harsher penalties for steroids than the other sports. But we still have Ryan Braun and Alex Rodriguez. So the problem still exists.
Unlike some of baseball's other problems, I have confidence that Major League Baseball will fix this. I have long despised the players' union. There were two reasons for that. First was the 1994 strike. Second was the way they initially reacted to the steroid crisis (pretending that there was no problem at all). Well, we haven't had a work stoppage since the 1994 strike and the union just let Ryan Braun accept a 65 game suspension for steroids. Skip Schumaker's reaction to Braun also gives me hope. During the 2005 steroid hearings in Congress, you had Curt Schilling (who was there as one of the "good guys") testifying and pretending that baseball didn't have a steroid problem. Now you have guys like Schumaker that are mad.
The penalties for steroids need to be harsher. Besides suspending players for not enough games, there's another problem. Ryan Braun is going to lose a couple of million dollars. But he's still going to get $133 million over the next eight years. I'd be fine if we went with Schumaker's suggestion of lifetime bans for first offenses. But I have a less drastic proposal. For a first offense, you receive a one-year suspension and your contract is no longer guaranteed (cut to the Yankees' front office enthusiastically endorsing my plan without hearing the rest of it). For a second offense, you receive a two-year suspension. For a third offense, you are banned for life. I doubt we'd ever get to strike three. If you were caught using steroids twice, you'd miss a total of three years of baseball. I don't think any team would want a player that was caught cheating twice and had missed three years of baseball. Besides getting cheaters out of the game, they would also lose the financial rewards (possibly hundreds of millions of dollars) they got for their cheating.
Ryan Braun is a cheater and a liar. He was caught. That's good. There's still work to be done. Alex Rodriguez, you're on deck.
No comments:
Post a Comment