[USML Announce] Slate Article: Pee No Evil

Tue Jun 6 14:26:22 EDT 2006

sports nut
Pee No Evil
Why are sportswriters pretending baseball's steroids era is over?
By Jeff Pearlman
Posted Friday, June 2, 2006, at 5:12 PM ET

It's easy to understand the media's love-fest with Albert Pujols. The
St. Louis Cardinals slugger crushes baseballs into the outer realms. And
more important in the wake of the BALCO fiasco, he has yet to be tainted
by evidence of steroid use.

Pujols <http://sports.espn.go.com/mlb/players/profile?statsId=6619>  has
25 homers in 51 games played, putting him on pace to break Barry Bonds'
record of 73 home runs in a single season. Both fans and rival players
breathlessly praise Pujols as they once did Bonds. St. Louis' marketing
department is constantly churning with new ideas for milking the Albert
cash cow. And within baseball's press boxes, writers and reporters check
their e-mail, drink free sodas, and question, well, nothing.

Two weeks ago, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported that Pujols
<http://www.stltoday.com/stltoday/sports/stories.nsf/cardinals/story/559
1149A7F22D5EE86257172001FC861?OpenDocument>  "is being touted as the
first P.S. slugger, post-steroids." The paper also categorized
speculation that Pujols might be juicing as an "errant rumor." The New
York Times followed up
<http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/23/sports/baseball/23bonds.html?ex=11493
93600&en=a3f3c75ea9e2f6f1&ei=5070>  with this Pujols quote: "My testing
is proving a lot. It's working really good." 

Is Pujols abusing steroids or human growth hormones? I don't know. But
what's alarming in this era of deceit is that nobody seems interested in
finding out. A little more than one year removed from congressional
hearings that produced the most humiliating images in the game's
history, baseball writers have a duty to second-guess everything.
Instead, everyone is taking Pujols' test results at face value. Have we
forgotten that Barry Bonds has never failed one of Major League
Baseball's drug tests?

In Sports Illustrated's baseball preview issue, Tom Verducci, who has
done great work exposing the proliferation of steroids in baseball
<http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/si_online/special_report/steroids/> ,
credulously praised the likes of Pujols and Twins catcher Joe Mauer
<http://sports.espn.go.com/mlb/players/profile?statsId=7062> . Verducci
exclaimed that baseball is now "a young man's game, belonging to new
stars who, certified by the sport's tougher drug policy, have replaced
their juiced-up, broken-down elders who aged so ungracefully. It's
baseball as it ought to be. A fresh start." In other words: Masking
agents? What masking agents?

Last year, editors at the Post-Dispatch assembled a task force to
investigate whether Mark McGwire had ingested performance-enhancing
drugs. After a short stretch of fruitless reporting, the effort died.
One would think that Pujols?a 13th-round draft pick who has put on 20
pounds of muscle since his debut in 2001?would at least warrant a
gander, or perhaps a flight or two to his native Dominican Republic to
check out the friendly neighborhood pharmacies. Yet the paper has lifted
nary a finger in examining Pujols' background. "Albert isn't an enhanced
thug like some of the other suspects," explains Rick Hummel, the
longtime Post-Dispatch baseball writer. "He hasn't grown significantly
and he's always had a lot of power. So what's there to look into?"

What's there to look into? How about this: For the past decade, baseball
has been routinely pulling the bait-and-switch with its fan base. When
McGwire and Sammy Sosa engaged in "The Chase" for the home-run record
during 1998, we were told the game was being saved, that two great men
with selfless hearts were doing the impossible. Oops, it was all a lie.
Three years later, we were asked to suspend belief yet again as the
37-year-old Bonds, with a head the size of Jupiter, effortlessly broke
McGwire's standard. 

Why are journalists so soft in this area? One reason: fear of being shut
out. Over the course of a 162-game season, beat writers and columnists
work their tails off to develop relationships with players. You grovel.
You whimper. You plead. You tiptoe up to a first baseman, hoping he has
five minutes to talk about that swollen toe. You share jokes
and?embarrassingly?fist pounds. Wanna kill all that hard work in six
seconds? Ask the following question: Are you juiced?

After having been duped by the men they cover, America's sportswriters
are playing dumb again. One year after being dismissed as a has-been,
steroid-using fibber, Yankees first baseman Jason Giambi is the toast of
New York. Recent articles in metropolitan newspapers have praised the
steadfastness and resiliency that have led him to hit a team-high 14
home runs. But where, oh where, are the doubters? At the start of spring
training in 2005, Giambi looked smaller than in seasons past. Now, he
has muscles atop muscles atop muscles. Yet unlike the San Francisco
Chronicle, which dedicated itself (journalistically and financially) to
learning the truth about Bonds, none of the New York dailies have
assigned an investigative team to the case. The closest we've come is
Joel Sherman of the New York Post, who recently wrote a piece
<http://www.nypost.com/sports/yankees/68400.htm>  titled "Clean
Machine?Giambi Says Fast Start Is Untainted." The article dies with this
whimper of a quote: "The big thing I learned during all my problems was
that I can only control what I can control. I can't stand on a soapbox
every day. I am working my tail off." 

I, for one, don't believe him. During my six years at Sports
Illustrated, I fell for the trick and covered Giambi as the hulking,
lovable lug who cracked jokes and hit monstrous homers. All the while,
he was cheating to gain an edge. So, why?when MLB doesn't administer a
test for human growth hormone?should I believe Giambi is clean?

Likewise, when I look at Roger Clemens, I wonder: Where's the
investigative digging? Like Bonds, Clemens is a larger-than-life
athletic specimen. Like Bonds, Clemens is producing at an age when most
of his peers are knitting. Unlike Bonds, Clemens does not have
journalists breathing down his neck. Instead, the hometown Houston
Chronicle has covered his recent re-signing with the Astros as a time
for unmitigated
<http://blogs.chron.com/baseballblog/archives/2006/06/clemens_gets_it.ht
ml>  celebration
<http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/sports/3919021.html> . Forget
combing through his garbage for vials?I just want the Chronicle to ask
Clemens whether he's used. Is the Rocket cheating? Again, I don't know.
But doesn't someone have to at least try and find out?

"A lot of baseball writers are drunks or cheat on their wives," says
Jose de Jesus Ortiz, the Chronicle's Astros beat writer. "I would never
question anybody unless I have evidence. It's unfair to feel that just
because of Bonds now we're required to question everyone about their
methods."

Is it unfair to pester individual athletes about steroids? Maybe. Is it
the right thing to do journalistically? Without a doubt. 

Jeff Pearlman is a former Sports Illustrated senior writer and the
author of Love Me, Hate Me: Barry Bonds and the Making of an Antihero
<http://www.lovemehateme.net/> .

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2142937/

Discuss, please.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lyra.siteprotect.com/pipermail/announce/attachments/20060606/247761c1/attachment-0001.htm