Barry Bonds is more juiced than a freshly squeezed glass of Tropicana. Most of the prominent MLB power hitters were the feature of a circus in Washington a few weeks ago, at which of all of the active players dubiously denied taking steroids.
So, the first victim of MLB’s apparent crackdown on steroid use is the nine wood of baseball’s golf bag: the relatively miniature Alex Sanchez. Of course! I, for one, can’t believe it took this long for Sanchez’s dirty secret to be revealed.
While the fact that the Tampa Bay centerfielder has taken steroids may be true, it is a joke that Sanchez is the first player to be punished by MLB’s newly-tightened steroid policy. Presumably all of the league’s superstars–that is, the players who hit the most home runs in this Age of Titans–are on steroids. In fact, the three players who sit on top of the single-season home run list, Bonds, Mark McGwire, and Sammy Sosa, have all been seriously accused of taking steroids. (For the record, while all three have denied use, they appear to be less believable than an election-time politician.) And while all three are among the many ruled guilty by the law of public opinion, it is still sad that MLB refuses to beef up testing measures and finally convict the accused.
Sanchez hit a Bonds-esque two homeruns last year, while driving in 26 runners. In fact, while some have hit four homeruns in one game, Sanchez has hit four homeruns in his career. Those are the statistics that we should mark with an asterisk, not the 73 homeruns of Bonds, or the three straight seasons of 60 homeruns that Sosa enjoyed, right?
Baseball nearly died in 1994 when many fans vowed never to come back after greedy players and even wealthier owners clashed on capital issues. Some may say that indicting the league’s most appealing faces could sabotage the game forever. As it is, though, baseball is doing the worst thing possible: by not confirming public doubt, it is allowing spoiled players laugh in the faces of the fans.
Sure, fans might abhor the guilty. They might promise to never watch another game of dishonest baseball. But, just as the steroid-induced home run chase of 1998 caused them to come back, another sensational baseball story will force the real fans to keep watching. Maybe it will be the return of the pitcher. Or, gasp! the elevation of small ball. To the pure fans, baseball is too great a game to be stained by some thuggish cheaters.
In the meantime, however, Major League Baseball, more than its players, is cheating the fans by embarrassing lowly players, rather than going after the most prominent perpetrators. If a fan is not a Detroit or Tampa Bay fan, or never owned Sanchez on a fantasy baseball team, chances are he has never heard of him. It does no good to punish Sanchez while the people who used steroids to break records, earn millions of dollars, and gain fans’ admiration, spit on everyone’s shoes.