[USML Announce] Slate Article: Pee No Evil

[rickgam at comcast.net]

Greetings;
     Re that crack staff assembled by the Post-Dispatch editors to look into McGwire's steroid use, but who gave up after a short, fruitless investigation - I forgot, was that the Curly or the Shemp staff?  Or were they investigating the McGuire Sisters' steroid use?  I think the last one died about 5 years ago, so that may have led to some confusion.  But I digress............, man do I digress!
    Rick

 -------------- Original message ----------------------
From: <bljansen at gmail.com>
> 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/
> 
> Copyright 2006 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
> 
> 
> Discuss, please.
> 



-------------- next part --------------
An embedded message was scrubbed...
From: <bljansen at gmail.com>
Subject: [USML Announce] Slate Article: Pee No Evil
Date: Tue, 6 Jun 2006 19:26:22 +0000
Size: 17314
Url: http://lyra.siteprotect.com/pipermail/announce/attachments/20060606/f81a258d/attachment-0001.eml