Baseball

"On matters of race, on matters of decency, baseball should lead the way." - A. Bartlett Giamatti Former Comm Baseball and Yale president and
"It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone...Of course, there are those who learn after the first few times. They grow out of sports. And there are others who were born with the wisdom to know that nothing lasts. These are the truly tough among us, the ones who can live without illusion, or without even the hope of illusion. I am not that grown-up or up-to-date. I am a simpler creature, tied to more primitive patterns and cycles. I need to think something lasts forever, and it might as well be that state of being that is a game; it might as well be that, in a green field, in the sun. From A Great and Glorious Game: Baseball Writings of A. Bartlett
Giamatti, © 1998 by A. Bartlett Giamatti.
" Source: The Green Fields of the Mind (Yale Alumni Magazine, November 1977)





Editorial

Fixing baseball
December 14, 2007
Thursday's blockbuster report on the widespread use of steroids and other illegal performance-enhancing substances in baseball could be the first step in the rehabilitation of the game's reputation. Commissioner Bud Selig responded quickly and -- here's a novelty for baseball -- forcefully to the devastating indictment. What a shame that it all took so long. Baseball hasn't just lost a World Series, as it did with the 1919 Black Sox scandal. It hasn't just lost a home run derby. This is well beyond the cloud over the Mark McGwire-Sammy Sosa chase of Roger Maris' iconic single-season record in 1998.

No, baseball has lost more than a decade. All that time, all those games, have been spoiled.

Former U.S. Sen. George Mitchell's report tells us that the use of these drugs has been rampant. Players from all 30 teams were implicated. The report alleges that superstars such as Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, Mo Vaughn, McGwire, Kevin Brown and Eric Gagne were users. And the report says there have been more users than its investigation uncovered.

The report details brazen behavior: drug runs to Mexico when visiting teams swung through San Diego, team restrooms used as injection stations, syringes left on clubhouse floors. "Everybody in baseball -- commissioners, club officials, the players association, players -- shares responsibility," Mitchell said Thursday...
2. News article
slander angle
Donald Fehr, head of the players' union, advised players not to cooperate with Mitchell because of the potential for unfair findings.

"Many players are named," Fehr said Thursday. "Their reputations have been adversely affected, probably forever, even if it turns out down the road that they should not have been [named]."

Mitchell's report found fault with everyone involved in the sport -- "the commissioners, the club officials, the players association and the players" -- for contributing to an environment that allowed the widespread use of steroids and human growth hormone in baseball.

"There was a collective failure to recognize the problem as it emerged and to deal with it early on," he said.

(Remember Joseph was in prison on false grounds)


3. They cheat themselves (besides cheating us Chgo Trib 12/14
Dr. Gary Green, a UCLA chemist who works as a consultant for MLB, said he believes steroid users eventually cheat themselves, as well as their fans and fellow competitors.

He cited a statement by East German swimmer Rica Reinisch, who won three gold medals in the 1980 Olympics while using steroids.

"The worst thing is they took away from me the opportunity to ever know if I could have won the gold medals without the steroids," Reinisch said. "That's the greatest betrayal of all."

To Green, that rings true.

"One of the shames of this is that the players who took steroids won't know how good they could have been without steroids," Green said.