February 14, 2005

Denial is a river in Egypt

By: Marty Coultas
Milwaukeeworld.com
MartyCoultas@Yahoo.com

Welcome back Milwaukeeworlders, Marty has been too busy with otherworldly issues for the last month to spend as much time on her blogs as she should have. Sorry about that but vacations and personal issues sometimes take precedence. Now, however, I have a couple of thoughts that need to be aired.

Let’s get it out right here at the beginning. Jose Canseco is a jerk. He has a history of breaking rules and thinking he is above the law and feeling he is worth more than he really ever was. He is a known for intentional miscommunication as well as extreme hyperbole. That said, I believe the allegations he has made in his new book. To refresh your memory, he alleges he has not only seen Major League Baseball players inject themselves with steroids but he claims to have made the injections himself. He says he gave injections to Mark McGwire, Rafael Palmeiro, Ivan Rodriguez, Jason Giambi and others. Keep in mind that Giambi has already admitted to a Federal Grand Jury that he did, in fact, buy and take steroids from Balco. The Baseball establishment has quickly circled the wagons and said that Canseco is a liar and a self serving jackass who is only trying to make money for himself. They trotted out Tony LaRussa who says that Big Mac and the others owe their outrageous Popeye physiques to “hard work.” Sure they do, all you have to do is look at the photographic evidence of a young Barry Bonds or Sammy Sosa or Ivan Rodriguez to see the results of their hard work.

All right, let’s get real. I want you to consider some comparisons of hard workers and you tell me what you think. Look at Sosa, I-Rod (not A-Rod), Bonds and Giambi. You tell me that they look real. Puffy faces, outsized biceps and giant pectorals. Six foot plus frames that appear to become more like wrestlers than ballplayers. All due to hard work. But I ask you to compare them to players in the NFL where steroids are and have been banned for many years. Do you think that running backs or linebackers or defensive linemen in the NFL would like to have the opportunity to excel and earn the big paychecks that would come from having a competitive advantage produced by drugs? Of course they would but they can’t. Tony LaRussa would have you believe that the athletes in the NFL are a bunch of slackers when it comes to hard work since they have not been able to build the body mass of baseball players. The “powers that be” in baseball are trying to make us believe that Emmitt Smith, Walter Payton, Tony Dorsett, Sterling Sharpe, Reggie White, Michael Strahan and all the other players in the NFL who have near legendary work ethic and training regimens are nothing more than a bunch of pikers compared to Canseco, Bonds, McGwire and Sosa. I am sorry but that is the biggest bunch of hooey that I have ever heard. I am not telling you that no one in the NFL would use steroids if they could get by with it. I am also not telling you I think anyone broke any rules or laws since Baseball didn’t have any rules against steroid use. My problem is with the obvious lack of honesty by the players and the owners who deny it. No athlete who ever lived worked as hard or was as dedicated to lifting as was Walter Payton. Other great football players who wanted to train with him quit after a day or two. Why didn’t Walter become a freaky looking “cartoonish” caricature? What about Sterling Sharpe or Marco Rivera? The answer is so obvious and yet Bud Selig and the rest of the baseball hierarchy want to kill the messenger rather than face up to the facts and admit the truth. It would seem to me that since the Monica Lewinsky matter everyone would have learned that truth is the best defense and denial can only lead to impeachment.

Canseco is a jerk and there is no denying it. He may not have ever injected any other player and he may never have seen any other player inject. But for baseball to deny that it happened and for LaRussa and the rest of the apologists to claim that the great growth spurts of the players in the 90s was only the result of hard work is an affront to the intelligence of their fan base and an embarrassing display of their own character. Of course, Canseco, who is currently number 25 on the all time list of homerun hitters has given up any hope of ever making the Hall of Fame regardless of the fact that he has better credentials than a lot of current members. And you can bet that McGwire and Bonds will get in and that their records will be admitted as well. The shame of all this is that baseball turned a blind eye and the result is that the game has been tarnished forever. Shoeless Joe and the Black Sox were nothing more than a minor infraction compared to the damage to the integrity of our National Pastime inflicted by these delusional manipulators of the truth.

Thanks, as always, for checking in and until we meet again Milwaukeeworlders, remember to keep your ears open and your noses clean!

Ciao,

Marty the Sports Chick
Milwaukeeworld.com
MartyCoultas@yahoo.com

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