3.13.2005
When Leak Happens
And now, this. It should come as no surprise that Mark McGwire turned out to be a major juicer, any overly cautious blabbering about innocent-until-proven-guilty be damned. What always surprised me the most were the repeated denials, right up until this Leak happened. McGwire had to know the hammer was going to come down eventually, right?
This has Clinton-Lewinsky written all over it. I don't mean to veer too far off the MLB path -- wait, yes I do. Clinton should have just admitted his affair with Lewinsky the first chance he got. He hadn't broken any laws, he hadn't sent anyone off to war, and everyone would have eventually gotten over it (except for Hillary). Instead of Ken Starr, we would have ended up with Leak after Leak about the tawdry habits of JFK, then Andrew Jackson, then Nixon, then...I don't know, Taft. And Clinton would have been exonerated with a flurry of "hey, c'mon, who doesn't?" But when you deny, and deny, and twist around, and deny further, you lend more and more gravity to That Thing You Done Wrong, and once the Leak comes out you've already backed yourself into a corner, surrounded yourself with rattlesnakes, and doused yourself in KC Masterpiece. (This exact progression has been depicted several times on Malcolm in the Middle.) Now McGwire will soon have to publicly deal with being not just a cheater but also a liar.
The big winner in all this is going to be Barry Bonds, once it eventually comes out that everyone was taking injections of one kind or another. One has to think Sosa can't be far off, with a handful of other Congress-bound sluggers to follow, and maybe even a pitcher or two whose velocity mysteriously bumped up 4-6 mph over the last few years. And soon we'll come to the most sensible conclusion possible, which is that Major League Baseball is extraordinarily difficult whether you're on drugs or not, and things will gradually descend to normal again.
We should consider ourselves fortunate that all this hoopla is upon us in the midst of March Madness (today was Selection Sunday), not to mention smack in the middle of spring training, with position battles and Grapefruit League footage heralding the start of another glorious season. Once the games start I look forward to following standings and scoreboards again, and by the time this McGwire mess is in full gear, so will everyone else. The NFL, on the other hand, won't have any distractions from its Leak, which also popped up Sunday. Nine players on one team? Performance-enhancing drugs in football? Never!
Buster Olney, in the column I linked above, closed his summary with the remark that "history is destined to remember this period as baseball's Steroid Era." It was probably a no-brainer of an ending for him, but try to recall the last time you read a nostalgia piece referring to baseball's Greenie Era and get back to me. If a genie could grant me one wish at this point, I would want everyone just to take a deep breath and pre-emptively move on.
This has Clinton-Lewinsky written all over it. I don't mean to veer too far off the MLB path -- wait, yes I do. Clinton should have just admitted his affair with Lewinsky the first chance he got. He hadn't broken any laws, he hadn't sent anyone off to war, and everyone would have eventually gotten over it (except for Hillary). Instead of Ken Starr, we would have ended up with Leak after Leak about the tawdry habits of JFK, then Andrew Jackson, then Nixon, then...I don't know, Taft. And Clinton would have been exonerated with a flurry of "hey, c'mon, who doesn't?" But when you deny, and deny, and twist around, and deny further, you lend more and more gravity to That Thing You Done Wrong, and once the Leak comes out you've already backed yourself into a corner, surrounded yourself with rattlesnakes, and doused yourself in KC Masterpiece. (This exact progression has been depicted several times on Malcolm in the Middle.) Now McGwire will soon have to publicly deal with being not just a cheater but also a liar.
The big winner in all this is going to be Barry Bonds, once it eventually comes out that everyone was taking injections of one kind or another. One has to think Sosa can't be far off, with a handful of other Congress-bound sluggers to follow, and maybe even a pitcher or two whose velocity mysteriously bumped up 4-6 mph over the last few years. And soon we'll come to the most sensible conclusion possible, which is that Major League Baseball is extraordinarily difficult whether you're on drugs or not, and things will gradually descend to normal again.
We should consider ourselves fortunate that all this hoopla is upon us in the midst of March Madness (today was Selection Sunday), not to mention smack in the middle of spring training, with position battles and Grapefruit League footage heralding the start of another glorious season. Once the games start I look forward to following standings and scoreboards again, and by the time this McGwire mess is in full gear, so will everyone else. The NFL, on the other hand, won't have any distractions from its Leak, which also popped up Sunday. Nine players on one team? Performance-enhancing drugs in football? Never!
Buster Olney, in the column I linked above, closed his summary with the remark that "history is destined to remember this period as baseball's Steroid Era." It was probably a no-brainer of an ending for him, but try to recall the last time you read a nostalgia piece referring to baseball's Greenie Era and get back to me. If a genie could grant me one wish at this point, I would want everyone just to take a deep breath and pre-emptively move on.
