Carlton Fisk goes off on McGwire

Evan, the difference between your analogies and steroids in baseball is the victim. In your examples, people either died or had money stolen from them. They’re directly effected. Withe steroids, there isn’t anyone who’s directly affected except the user — when/if they begin to experience the adverse side effects. You may be able to claim that steroids let a player recover faster from injury which kept another player from getting as many ABs and cost them some money in their next contract…but even in that case, the steroid user isn’t the one inflicting the harm.
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And please don’t say that the record books were directly impacted. Record books record historical facts. Record books do not pass judgements.

Sorry Evan, got lost in the shuffle. On the drunk driving thing:
I’ll set aside the vast moral differences between vehicular homicide and the violation of workplace drug rules. I mean, if we considered that, your analogy would be damn night meaningless right out of the box. But let’s play!
Your hypothetical is actually something that comes up all the time. It’s a factor in the Jim Leyritz case, for example. Legally speaking, yes, you automatically convict the driver of DUI if he was legally drunk in that accident. The law does not, however, automatically convict you of vehicular homicide simply because you were drunk. The jury absolutely will hear about the other evidence in play to see if, in addition to the DUI itself, the driver’s consumption of alcohol was the proximate cause of the deaths. In your case, sure, the driver is probably guilty of both, but if the pedestrians were lying down in the road wearing black clothes at night after knocking out a streetlight due to some fraternity hazing ritual, no, they won’t convict the driver of their deaths.
Yes, I realize that’s rather extreme, but I’m trying to point out that your premise is flawed. I’ll admit that I may be misunderstanding you though.
More generally speaking, however, I’m not really talking about not punishing steroid users here. If they test positive, punish them. It doesn’t matter what else they’ve done. I’m talking about assessing their careers as a whole. I think it’s entirely possible to appreciate some aspects of, say, Barry Bonds’ career while disparaging others.
To go back to your drunk driving example, it would be akin to writing a biography about a doctor who saved thousands of patients in his life but then one day was convicted of drunk driving. Of course you have to deal front and center with the fact that he broke the law and, depending on the circumstances, took a life. But the biography still contains the stuff about his medical work. You don’t pretend that never happened in that assessment, even if you don’t let it enter too greatly into his criminal trial.

Craig, the problem with your reasoning is that you are relying entirely on anecdotal evidence. Anecdotal evidence is reasonable for establishing trends, but not for defining absolutes. Certainly there are many factors involved in hitting home runs, many of which you mention, but they are unquantifiable. Without PEDs, would he have hit 60 home runs instead of 70? If so, just a very good season, not a record season. Is the effect of PEDs only a relatively minor 10%? If so, Barry Bonds has not hit more steroid-less home runs than Hank Aaron … no record there. That is the problem with the steroid era, and that is the heart of the steroid-era debate. There is also anecdotal evidence to be found in the numbers that suggests the effect of steroids is significant when compared to many of those other factors you allude to such as the changing strike zone, the livelier ball, and imrproved physical training. In regard to the latter, while we have made great strides in physical conditioning, science does dictate that, based upon the way the human body evolves over time, the rapid physical advancement seen in people like Sosa, Bonds, and McGwire is outside the bounds of normal evolution and was chemically enhanced. But the question again is how much, and how much effect does it have on performance. Simply put, conclusions cannot be drawn from the evidence as you suggest, only trending information, and that renders the records from the steroid era incomparable to the records from prior to that era.
Back to my initial point, it was simply that one cannot defensibly conclude that the effect of steroids is less than most people think. As for the acceptability of the steroid -era records, everyone has to make a personal judgment for themselves. Perhaps, however, there also has to be a collective judgment made by professional baseball (and if they are smart with significant input from the fans base) regarding what to do about the official records. Whatever that decision might be, it is certainly to please less than half the people who care.

1) Here’s some historical context for you: steroids were developed in 1889. At least one 19th century player now in the Hall of Fame is reputed to have tried them (Pud Galvin). Sports Illustrated had articles in 1960 and 1969 about widespread PED use in sports, including baseball. Amphetamines are also PEDs, and several Hall of Famers have been reported as having used them–including Willie mays and Mickey Mantle. Jim Bouton wrote in “Ball Four” (1969) that if a drug were offered to a pitcher that would gaurantee him 20 wins but subtract 5 years from his life, he’d take it every time. Bill Lee in “The Wrong Stuff” stated that amphetamines (just as illegal as steroids) were so prevalent in the 1970s that players not taking them were labelled “naked.” Tom House (major league pitcher for the Braves, Red Sox, and Mariners (1971-1978) stated that he and many other teammates used steroids and HGH in the 1970′s [so, exactly, when did "the steroids era" begin, anyway?]. I can provide links to all these, but you can google them yourself, or read earlier posts over the last week and find them all.
2) Steroids have horrible health effects, so do amphetamines. How do you differentiate who did what or which PED is worse?
3) Yes, please teach your kids right from wrong, but don’t expect any athlete to serve as a great role model. All are fallible human beings, and the temptations are too great. Steroids and amphetamines have even found their way into the high school gyms in some places.
4) Thank goodness there’s testing now, but it does not go far enough. The MLBPA is still resisting blood testing, which is the only currently feasible way to test for HGH. Without testing, it’s a given that many players are still using it. With the astronomical dollars involved, it’s also a given that there are other labs out there to fill BALCO’s “void” in producing “designer” steroids that aren’t detected by current testing. The Olympics have the best/most comprehensive testing around through WADA, yet athletes get caught trying to use various PEDs at every games–again, the temptations are just too great for some.
5) I’m not saying PEDs are “A-OK” and neither is Craig Calcaterra. I do think, however, that each player’s history needs to be judged in its own context. There has never been a “clean” period in baseball history & it shouldn’t be the point. The point should be to try to make sure that the game is made a clean as possible going forward.

thank you..well said.

Sue – The players, the commissioner, the owners and the general managers and anyone else who was stuffing money in their pockets during the “Steroid Era” have no guilt over their decisions to use or turn a blind eye when it came to what was going on in the game. The historical context does exist however whether you want to admit it or not, the records that were broken by the players who have admitted their use of PED’s are tarnished. Some baseball fans are purists or students of the game and the records of Aaron, Maris, Gehrig and others mean something to those fans, if the records don’t mean anything to you well that is o.k., but not everyone sees things the way you do. The players who took the drugs feel shame only at the fact that they were caught or their names were linked to the scandal, they feel no shame because of using the drugs or making the money or anything else, it was simply that they got caught.
You also need to remember that if your kids like the players that are mixed up in this mess you must explain it to your kids. Professional athletes as a whole should not be idolized by kids and should most certainly not be “role models” for our kids. Counting on what happens in the media whether it is in sports or mainstream life to teach your kids the lessons of right and wrong is a bad idea, as a parent you should discuss these issues with your children and let them know why you think these athletes made mistakes or cheated or whatever you want to call it. I have explained and discussed the Steroid issue with both of my sons at length as they are both high school athletes and they know that their mother and I view the use of Steroids as not only as illegal but also as cheating.

“Back to my initial point, it was simply that one cannot defensibly
conclude that the effect of steroids is less than most people think.”
I’m fine with that as long as you similarly decline to conclude that the effect is as great as most people think, and that the judgments based on those thoughts — i.e. Bonds was a total fraud; Clemens would have been washed up in 1995 — are likewise faulty and without basis. In other words, if I don’t get my anecdotal assumptions, you don’t get yours.
What does that leave us with? The record book. I think you assume (as many do) that the record book is the big golden grail here, and that what this all means has to be talked about in terms of the records. You can believe that, but I reject that as an arbitrary measuring stick.
I asked Rich Gossage last week who he thought the real home run king was. He said Hank Aaron. That’s great. He’s entitled to his judgments. Sure, when he tells people that he has to make sure he’s telling them that it’s what he thinks rather than what some lifeless record book says, but I don’t think he’d have any problem with that, and I respect his view about who he feels really is the home run king.
Why? Because it kind of doesn’t matter what the record book says. When you and your friends talk about the greatest hitter/pitcher/fielder or whatever of all time, do you merely default to the record book? When you talk about your favorite players do you say “well, I used to like Rod Carew, but then Molitor pased him on the hit list, so I switched to Molitor.” Of course you don’t, because there’s so much more important to baseball than that.
The only time I ever find myself talking about records is when I’m literally talking about who did X more times than someone else as a counting or calculating exercise. Any assessments of greatness or judgments of overall quality or bullshitting about baseball in general occurs on multiple axis, only one of which is the record book. I think Barry Bonds was a great player, but I’m not going to pretend the fact that he hit more balls over the fence proves that. Nor would I neglect to mention that, yeah, the guy did steroids, so we have to take all of it with a grain of salt.
I’ve gone on too long about that. I don’t know that we fundamentally disagree on the facts. I think we just place different values on the record books and disagree about who has the burden of proof in establishing the effect of steroids. I don’t think we’ll change each others’ minds about the former. We may not have any possible answer to the latter.

I agree! Well said. Maybe YOU should be writing this column for NBC Sports. What sickens me is that PEDs have indeed found their way into our high schools. This is all the fault of professional sports franchises and their owners, who are too greedy from the money and the limelight to put a stop to it. But I maintain my original position: No matter when steroids and other PEDs were introduced, they are wrong (heck, just look at the long-term physical and psychological effects of them). Widespread use doesn’t deem it ok. And I’m still going to teach my kids that they will be far better people (with normal-sized testicles and less of a chance of cancer) if they don’t cheat. Now I’ll just wait for some moron to comment “Who decides what testicle size is normal?”

I agree with you Sue, Steriods are wrong…Not sure about nut size? But i can make an arguement against coffee to video games as wrong…it is a value…I do not use my beliefs to influence anyone else.

Sue said: And I’m still going to teach my kids that they will be far better people … if they don’t cheat.”
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Exactly Sue. YOU are going to teach your kids that. Not Barry Bonds, not Mark McGwire, not Roger Clemens. You.

It’s sad, all really sad. I watched McGwire break the record, a record that I originally watched back in Maris set the record live in 1961 and watched McGwire break it live. I watched the magic moment as the game stopped and McGwire jumped up into the stands and hugged Maris’s children and everyone had tears in their eyes, you couldn’t love the game and not.
Now even that has been spoiled by admitted steroid usage. I hope the right thing is done here, I hope an asterisk is branded on his homerun ball too and another placed by his name on the record books just like Roger Maris has. It’s sad to see such a talented player prostitute his integrity and judgment in this manner, and to break the trust and faith so many had in him. Boo Mark McGwire!

I would like to know really when did testing for PEDs Steroids start. We are a nation of unvaluable opinions. We get angry at what other people do. Its the media that exploits all of these findings to the public. So are kids obviously are watching to much TV and reading to much garbage. Its not the players telling our children lets help you shrink your balls. I firmly believe most often its the parents fault for the way their children are raised. I just love when people put everyone else at blame. How do we truly know that our hall of famers weren’t taking something in their time. We went on their word c’mon be real. If we could take our advancements to older times I could almost guarentee some of our great hall of famers were taking something at one time or another.

BOO? If you watched Maris play…You are way to old to act like a idiot.

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