Liners, Sliders and Steroids

I can’t actually sit and not say ANYTHING about this steroid business, so Liners, Sliders and Scoops is back on the air.

Due to the fact that everyone has said something, there really isn’t much new to write. I’ve thought for a long time that it was weird that a declining Roger Clemens was able to win consecutive Cy Young awards throwing a combined 498 innings in 1997 and 1998, way past his prime. Other people have pointed this out.

The only two things right now that I can add to this whole Mitchell Report business are these:

There needs to be a meaningful reevaluation of players who played from, let’s say 1975 to 1995. We need to see if maybe some of the guys who weren’t Hall of Famers because their numbers weren’t good enough are actually Hall-worthy. Maybe they don’t look so bad – I’m talking the Keith Hernandez-, Don Mattingly-type guys – considering the fact that their immediate peers cheated. Nobody’s talking about that right now. I’ll think about it. These guys could be really positively impacted by the whole drug thing.

The fashionable thing to do – let’s call it the Andy Pettitte, Fernando Vina, Brian Roberts defense – seems to be to say, “I cheated a few times, then I stopped, because it was wrong.” PR-wise, this is totally the smartest way to go about it. Roger Clemens is still denying everything through his agent, and nobody believes him. Pettitte, Vina and Roberts learned a lot from Bill Clinton’s mistakes. I hate to say it, but I can’t say I totally believe Pettitte, Vina and Roberts, but they at least look like they’ve got SOME character. Of all the people whose first real link to steroids and human growth hormone came in the Mitchell report, let’s wait and see how many come out with the “Dude, I did it, but only a few times because I was hurt,” and how many totally deny everything. I can almost guarantee that the “Sorry for this, but I did it a few times,” will come out looking more honest to fans.

And that’s really all that matters, is the fans. Or more accurately, the records the fans love. Baseball will survive this. Home runs are already down, testing is already working, but some fans are disenchanted. This is NOT as bad as the 1919 scandal that had the White Sox fixing World Series games, or even as bad as the 1994 owner’s lockout that cancelled the last quarter of the season and the World Series. But it’s bad, because it’s a one-size-fits-all asterisk on all the game’s records since the 1980s – and don’t even think it doesn’t go back to the mid 1980s – and more than any other sport, baseball is a game of records. And we want them sacred, and we get flustered and angry when they’re not sacred. So once baseball can assure us that the numbers are all sacred again, the game will be okay.

There are some players who come out as winners here. Those include finesse pitching, 300-game winners like Greg Maddux and Tom Glavine. Maddux is going to go down as the best starting pitcher of his generation. Glavine’s even going to go down as better than Clemens. Who would’ve thought THAT two years ago?

And Mattingly, Hernandez, Dave Parker, all those types of players, maybe they’ll also be the big winners.

Parker’s 339 career homers don’t look so bad anymore, do they?