Baseball Still Doesn’t Quite Get It
February 19, 2008 by Albert Bianchi
Filed under Sports Rumors
Yes! Can you believe it? Even more quotes about baseball and steroids that don’t just seem to be exactly clued in. This one is from extreme peripheral figure Hank Steinbrenner. Hank thinks baseball is unfairly being made the focus of performance-enhancing drugs in sports.
“I don’t like baseball being singled out,” the New York Yankees senior vice president said in a telephone interview with The Associated Press on Monday night.
“Everybody that knows sports knows football is tailor-made for performance-enhancing drugs. I don’t know how they managed to skate by. It irritates me. Don’t tell me it’s not more prevalent. The number in football is at least twice as many. Look at the speed and size of those players.”
A baseball figure made a meandering argument that didn’t address the issue but merely shifted blame. I wonder what style the NFL would use to respond.
Answered NFL spokesman Greg Aiello: “We’ve had year-round random testing with immediate suspensions since 1990 and we conduct approximately 12,000 steroids tests a year.”
Ok, first of all: Burn. Secondly, that is the essential difference between the NFL’s and MLB’s handling of steroids, et al. The NFL saw that there was a problem and addressed it to a satisfactory point pretty early on. MLB stubbornly refused to address the problem until it was to late. Sort of like how baseball deals with increased scrutiny by basically trying to shift the blame to football.
The reason the NFL implemented steroid tested 20 years ago was because THEY NEEDED IT 20 YEARS AGO!!! That is how far ahead of the PED curve the NFL is, and always will be. The is no practical test for HGH yet in existence. After steroid testing started in the NFL it players had allready moved on to the next wave of PEDs, which included HGH and designer steroids that were not originally detectable in urine tests. By the time a useful HGH test comes into existence NFL players will have allready moved on to the next wave of PEDs. Here in lies the rub. The science/players are always ahead of the game.
It so totally figures that when someone with some national profile FINALLY speaks up and talks about something that no one wants to admit he’ll just be painted as an old kook. But we all know that he is right.
This is not just a baseball problem. It is a sports problem. It is a societal problem.
I agree, it was a problem for football 20 years ago, just as it was a problem for baseball 20 yeas ago. Football acknowledged the problem, probably realizing they’d only catch the lazy juicers, but establishing a stance against. Baseball just ignored the problem until Jose Canseco wrote a book. That’s the essential difference. Football is ahead of the curve on inefficient testing, baseball is behind.
You actually believe that?
Did the NFL’s “tough” testing policy keep those Carolina Panther players from using PEDs (and not just HGH, testable PEDs were involved) just prior to the Superbowl?
Steroids were not nearly the problem in MLB that they were in the NFL twenty years ago. The Steeler dynasty of the 70’s was chock full of steroid users.
The preception is that the NFL cares, or has tried to stop PED use. It’s a farce. wake up.
I never claimed the NFL’s testing policy was tough, but it was a policy. Considering the NFL has had a policy since 1990, the perception that the NFL cares and has tried to stop PED use appears to be correct. Trying and succeeding are two very different things.
The essential issue — for me at least — with baseball is that they didn’t react to steroid use in baseball until Jose Canseco wrote a book and Barry Bonds grew to comic proportions. It’s not about whether PED testing is ineffective or not, it was that baseball’s reaction to steroid use was to ignore the problem and hoped it went away.
In regards to the 70s Steelers, I wasn’t aware that 6′4″ 220 lb. linebacker Jack Lambert or 6′1″ 255 center Mike Webster were on steroids.
And just to be clear, I’m not trying to defend MLB. I just feel that it is hypocrital of sports fans, the media, and, it seems, people in general to make MLB out to be main culprits of PED use when it seems so obvious that the NFL, whether they have been testing for STEROIDS (never mind the rampat use of HGH) or not, has a MUCH larger PED use problem, but it gets relatively NO attention from the media.
In all seriousness, does that argument sound fair?