Now We Know: Everyone Didn't Do it. The Case Against the Superstar Criminals

that the Union was secretly telling the players a month in advance of when they were going to be tested which begs the question how did anyone get caught, perhaps they didn’t tell the lower echelon players. Steroids didn’t help someone hit a baseball, it helped guys who could hit a baseball hit it further. Gary Mathews hit 40 plus HR’s one year, then 10 HR’s the next?
The real villain in the entire episode was the Union.
They told the owners that testing would not be part of any negotiations in the labor agreement and that they would strike if the owners brought it up. Since the players are the union and the one to benefit most from good stats they cannot play the “we did nothing wrong” card.

I’m not sure exactly how they will be changed. Shoot, as an anti-roider, I’m not sure how it will be change my view, other than to think it probably will.

As a home run hitter, ARod has been a sort of aspirin. By being a dominant slugger from the beginning of his career, without big weight gains, Rodriguez didn’t seem as suspicious. There weren’t the statistical anomalies that made someone like Bonds jump out as an obvious juicer. This allowed him, suspcions notwithstanding, to be promoted as the player who would wash away the sins of an era.

That was always more than a little naive, given the likelihood that smart players would figure out ways around tests that are still pretty easy to evade. But it was tempting nonetheless, especially with the best-known culprits out of the game or in the twilights of their careers.

So much for that.

Rodriguez is the best player in the baseball, will almost certainly shatter the all-time home run record, is a juicer – and will playing for years to come. He and Bonds both lied about it, and the only remaining question is whether the feds will nail Bonds with a perjury rap.

Part of me thinks this helps the “clean” players, but we don’t really know who most of them are. Shoot, Bonds passed the 2003 test. And then there’s the reports about players being tipped off the following year.

It’s almost hopeless to untangle it all now, or going forward, which is why I understand the urge of many people to throw up their hands and say it doesn’t matter. I’m not there, in part because I can’t shake the feeling that some players really benefited from the juice in genuinely unfair ways, but I have to admit I’m closer than I used to be.

The era of PEDs (steroids, HGH, etc…) may have gotten into full swing in the 1990s, but it’s still with us.

These guys were on some good S#!^. Those performances were ridiculous and we couldn’t tell if humans, as a whole were on special muscle building and recovery serums, or just getting healthier into old-age. Good article by Ratto today about this as a “social health” problem, and I refuse to acknowledge a MMA-dominated world when everyone has access to “the clear.” Big ups to sports like lawn bowling, skateboarding, billiards, chess, skiing, snowboarding, where the only PED is good chronic.

Thanks for making the case that throwing our hands up and saying, “let’s just move on; how can we know anything?” is a pretty lazy position intellectually.

Some of the players using and enjoying tremendous benefits were always completely obvious: Bonds, McGwire, Sosa, Boone, Canseco, Pudge, and Brady Anderson. Others were pretty obvious like Giambi and Tejada. About many others it was just hard to tell. I like the argument you make using the available data. The correlation between the data and many stars is pretty clear, I’d say.

And finally the argument that they were great anyway applies to some and not all. And they weren’t as great as we thought, it turns out.