It's hard to get superstars to admit that they used steroids. Heck, you have to basically catch them with the syringe stuck in them to get an apology. But there's one former superstar who readily admits that if he played in another era, he would have cheated. That former superstar is Darryl Strawberry.
"Hell, yeah, I would have used them!" he thundered when asked a hypothetical about himself. "Are you kidding me? I mean, c'mon. Some things are part of what athletes go through, and they happen."
Heck, why not? Strawberry was pretty much a part of everything that athletes go through, why not steroids, too? You see Strawberry, like Alex Rodriguez, was young and stupid. But when he got older, he apparently got wiser, as he resisted the steroid temptation in the '90s.
In these troubling times, where you can't simply follow the game of baseball without hearing about steroids everywhere you turn, we could all use a moral compass so that we can have something to tell our children. When it comes to the Alex Rodriguez saga, Pete Rose, who was banished from baseball for betting on games while he was a manager, is happy to provide us with that moral compass.
"Being my good and close friend, I was disappointed about A-Rod's admission."
Yeah, he should have waited until he had a book to sell, right Pete?
It's always interesting to see how peers react when one of their own get clipped for steroids. Barry Bonds seemed to get more vilification from fans than from players (except for maybe Turk Wendell). You would think that among his own, Alex Rodriguez would get the same kind of support.
Major League Baseball kills me sometimes. They want to get tough on enhancing your performance through drug use, but then a player does his due diligence only to get clipped because the league changes the list of banned substances without giving players enough notice or grace period. Take the case of J.C. Romero, who has found himself stuck with a 50-game ban ... not for cheating, but for "negligence".
Three months after Romero was tested before a Phillies-Mets game on Aug. 26, the players' association sent a Nov. 21 letter to players that stated, "We have previously told you there is no reason to believe a supplement bought at a U.S. based retail store could cause you to test positive under our Drug Program. That is no longer true. We have recently learned of three substances which can be bought over the counter at stores in the United States that will cause you to test positive. These three supplements were purchased at a GNC and Vitamin Shoppe in the U.S."
So what Major League Baseball is saying is this: "J.C., we told you the rules and you followed the rules. But because we just found these substances now we're going to ban you. Sorry, you should have read our minds even before these new substances were even in our minds." So who are the negligent ones here? The player for doing what he's told? Or the MLB machine for changing the rules in the middle of the game and then handing out retroactive punishment? It's the World Series rain delay all over again.
If you're worried about a lack of free agent movement because of the pending findings and names named in the "Mitchell Report", Mets GM Omar Minaya would advise you not to be concerned, at least as far as Minaya goes, as he gets ready for this week's GM's meetings in Orlando.
As major league general managers arrived Monday for their annual meetings, the New York Mets' Omar Minaya said he won't hesitate to pursue players because they could be listed in George Mitchell's report as drug users.
"If there was a player that we like and we wanted to get, we've just got to go get the player," Minaya said. "It would be terrible if I was to kind of pass on the player because of - quote, unquote - the potential of the Mitchell Report, and then have that player not be on the list."
Mitchell's report, the culmination of an investigation the former Senate Majority Leader began in March 2006, is expected to be issued before the end of the year. A lawyer for baseball owners told teams last month they should proceed on the assumption that it will name players implicated in the use of performance-enhancing substances.
Come on now, you're not surprised that a man who signed Guillermo Mota to a two-year deal after being busted for steroids in the winter of '06-'07 would be scared of the Mitchell Report, are you?
We were warned that we were going to learn more about our favorite cheaters, and the names are being leaked, one by one. The latest name to come out: Mets reliever Scott Schoeneweis. ESPN The Magazine tells us more:
According to a source in Florida close to the ongoing investigation of Signature (Pharmacy), Schoeneweis' name appears on packages that were sent to Comiskey Park while the White Sox were battling to win the AL Central title in 2003. Two more shipments arrived at the stadium in 2004, months before Schoeneweis underwent arthroscopic surgery on his left elbow. (...)
The source who reviewed the invoices said that Schoeneweis spent $1,160 on the steroids. The packages he received on May 23 and June 25, 2003, contained 10 milliliter bottles of both testosterone and stanozolol. The package sent on Sept. 3 had double the dose of stanozolol -- the same drug that caused Rafael Palmiero to be suspended for 10 games in 2005 after it showed up in his urine. The last three shipments -- on Nov. 18, 2003, and April 15 and June 24, 2004 -- contained one 10 ml bottle of testosterone. Gary Wadler, a physician and member of the World Anti-Doping Agency, said that while it might make sense for someone with hormone deficiencies to take testosterone, he had never heard of anyone taking stanozolol to help with the affliction.
"It's not an approved use, as far as I'm aware of," he said.
Not that I'm sure this has anything to do with the Mets since he was with the White Sox when this went down, but boy, when it rains, it sure as heck pours for that franchise. The Mets caught a lot of heat for re-signing Guillermo Mota after he failed a drug test last winter. With Schoeneweis still under contract for two more seasons, it will be interesting to see if the Mets take a different course of action if they feel they need to please their fans.Sorry, No Photos
Yahoo!'s Dan Wetzel -- who seems like a talented guy, except that he works for those boss-stealing, exclamation-abusing jerks -- writes about a potential bombshell today: the D.E.A.'s largest performance-enhancer sting ever. Thanks to the sting, a huge database of known criminals is being created, and could be used against Major League Baseball players (and other professional athletes:
The list, a DEA spokesperson said, should contain "hundreds of thousands of names."
Never before has so much evidence been collected. The list is exponentially longer than anything ever previously compiled. While, undoubtedly, it isn't the complete tally of every American involved in this, it is significant. And since the feds aren't even remotely done with the investigation, the list should grow in time.
The potential numbers here are staggering, the potential impact difficult to fathom. This isn't a BALCO investigation, the busting of a single California lab which netted a couple dozen athletes yet still rocked sports to its core.
This is far greater. It is an opportunity to find out just how widespread doping is in American sports. Consider baseball: Is it five percent of the 1,500 Major League players? 15 percent? 50 percent? The worst-case scenarios are chilling. This is no longer about whether a handful of top players might get caught, although that alone could be devastating. It's about possibly finding out almost no one is legit.
That's a lot of blockquoting, but you get the point. This list = bad for athletes trying to hide their association with steroids or HGH or any of the other things they're not supposed to be doing.
It's not guaranteed that the list will be made available to the MLB or NFL or especially the public, but some politican needs to make it happen. It's time to pull the cover back on the whole thing, once and for all. Maybe this will do the trick.
Of course I'm only kidding with that headline; I'm sure Judge Thomas C. Platt loves America, and he may even have a particular affinity for baseball. He just doesn't seem to think that the public should know which players have been implicated in steroid use:
In an eight-page decision Friday, U.S. District Judge Thomas C. Platt in Central Islip ruled there was no public right to the names, contained in a December 2005 sworn statement by IRS Special Agent Jeff Novitzky used to obtain a search warrant for the home of former New York Mets clubhouse attendant Kirk Radomski.
"Requiring public disclosure would have a negative effect on the government's effort to investigate criminal conduct," Platt wrote.
"Public access to the names of baseball players with whom Mr. Radomski is associated ... has no role in the oversight or functioning of the judicial and law-enforcement processes," Platt wrote.
"There is no tradition of public access to the names of unindicted third parties and to specific personal identifying information where disclosure of this information is sought by the public," Platt wrote. "Additionally, there is no traditional right of public access to search-warrant materials nor is there a traditional right for the public to attend search-warrant proceedings."
And that's officially frustrating. I understand the lack of legal precedent, but I would argue that the case of steroids and baseball presents a special circumstance well within the "public interest." Then again, I'm no legal scholar, so I should probably just stop talking.
The lesson here: we will never really know who did what and where and why, at least not totally. And that makes me angry.
As we sit and patiently wait for the results of George Mitchell's investigation -- which may or may not yield some blockbuster information -- we've been learning far more from reporters breaking stories about the Albany District Attorney's investigations of Signature Pharmacy, your one stop shop for assumed baseball acuity.
Just four days earlier, two Albany attorneys representing MLB also met with District Attorney P. David Soares, offering to help.
Still, Soares, whose office has worked for months with NFL officials who provided information, said it remains to be seen how the relationship with MLB will develop.
"There are still rules of engagement and how it seems that we're going to work together that have to be discussed, and if there's anything they can offer us in helping us with our case," he said before Thursday's meeting.
This can only help Mitchell's investigation, one would think, but it's hard to imagine exactly what the major pro sports leagues have to offer the Soares. If his office isn't concerned with the sport as he says, does Mitchell -- or the NFL -- actually know more about how steroids and HGH are being distributed, and where to bust both sides of the operation?
While we're still waiting to hear from Troy Glaus about his considerably more serious offenses, Rick Ankiel went on the defensive yesterday about HGH he received in 2004. Is his explanation satisfactory? I'll let you decide:
Rick Ankiel says any drugs he received in 2004 were prescribed by a licensed physician to help him recover from reconstructive elbow surgery.
Ankiel, whose comeback is one of the great stories of this season, initially acknowledged human growth hormone was among those medications during a brief session with reporters Friday, then refused to list his various prescriptions.
"I'm not going to go into the list of what my doctors have prescribed for me," the St. Louis Cardinals outfielder said when asked specifically whether he had taken HGH as part of his recovery. "I've been through a lot emotionally and physically. There are doctor and patient privileges, and I hope you guys respect those privileges."
"I respect the integrity of the game," Ankiel said, "and I'm on the same playing level that everybody else is on."
While I appreciate Ankiel's forthright responses, or at least his willingness to meet with the media, whether or not you believe Ankiel is going to come down to whether you think the HGH was only for recovery purposes. I don't know if I can take that leap of faith, but I have a feeling most Cardinals fans will have no such reservations.
It's hard to get superstars to admit that they used steroids. Heck, you have to basically catch them with the syringe stuck in them to get an apology. But there's one former superstar who readily admits that if he played in another era, he would have cheated. That former superstar is Darryl Strawberry.
In these troubling times, where you can't simply follow the game of baseball without hearing about steroids everywhere you turn, we could all use a moral compass so that we can have something to tell our children. When it comes to the 
It's always interesting to see how peers react when one of their own get clipped for steroids. 
Major League Baseball kills me sometimes. They want to get tough on enhancing your performance through drug use, but then a player does his due diligence only to get clipped because the league changes the list of banned substances without giving players enough notice or grace period. Take the case of 
If you're worried about a lack of free agent movement because of the pending findings and names named in the "Mitchell Report", Mets GM 
We were 
Yahoo!'s Dan Wetzel -- who seems like a talented guy, except that he works for those boss-stealing, exclamation-abusing jerks -- writes about a potential bombshell today: the 
Of course I'm only kidding with that headline; I'm sure Judge Thomas C. Platt loves America, and he may even have a particular affinity for baseball. He just doesn't seem to think that the public 
As we sit and patiently wait for the results of 
While we're still waiting to hear from 
