“Tell me why, then, are people so willing to yell “steroids” at the first sign of an outlier? Could it be that Selig has ONCE AGAIN failed the sport MISERABLY?”

Not to entirely discount the latter (and you’d have to include the union with Selig), but to address the former: a lot of people are stupid, and – especially the majority of sports “journalists” – are more interested in spectacle and controversy than facts or truth.

“You know, simple, pure, innocent.”

If you believe that baseball – or almost any other activity engaged in by adults – is simple, pure, and innocent – you’re either naive or deluded.

How simple, pure, and innocent was baseball when it was segregated, or when players were popping amphetamines like they were M&Ms, or when the owners colluded to lowball salaries, etc?

Now, I do fault the union and Selig for not starting drug testing (which they actually did) and standing up together and saying “look, we now have this program in place, it is hard to keep up with testing technology, but we’re doing all we can, like the Olympics, etc are doing. Anyone who violates this policy will be discliplined as x, y, z”.

And at that point, stand as one and say shut the f$ck up to any media blather and obtuse accusations. And keep repeating the mantra in quotes above.

Selig blew it by allowing/promoting Bonds to become the poster boy, thinking it would deflect the dialogue. That set an atmosphere of cover-up, and that impression continues on with (insert your own litany of accused players) and mush-mouthed semi-non-confessions. It has become a “have you stopped beating your wife” scenario, and both the Union and Selig have failed baseball by not standing by what they HAVE done.

it’s a feature of wordpress, basically called “trackbacks”

How do you know that they did, and more importantly how do you know that none of the others did? How often and what kind of PEDs did they use? Who knows? What kind of impact did they get just from the PEDs? Did any of the others cheat in any other way, like using a corked bat or stealing signs? How would you ever know for sure? Which guys faced the most PED-using pitchers or spitball throwers or ball-scuffers?

Joe’s point is that players have been having outlier home run seasons for as long as there has been baseball. And that’s true.

The fact is that players have also been bending the rules and flat-out outright cheating for as long as there has been baseball.

Good luck trying to sort out which guys cheated and which guys didn’t, and which guys cheated but didn’t get caught, and how much their cheating helped them, either directly physically or through the placebo effect, compared with the cheating of the pitchers they had to face.

I don’t know why anyone would bother trying to figure all that out. It’s impossible, and any “conclusions” you come to will be wrong due to incomplete knowledge.

Personally, I just look at what the players did on the field, because we have never known what truly goes on off the field and we never did in the past either.

Bobby Thomson’s Shot Heard Round the World wouldn’t have happened if the Giants hadn’t had a totally illegal electronic sign-stealing system in place for a lot of that season. What do we gain from finding that out? Does that home run “not count” now, because it never could have taken place without illegal cheating, which helped the Giants make their amazing comeback to force the playoff? Of course not. They cheated, they got away with it, it’s unfortunate, but it all still happened. It was an amazing historical moment. Did other teams cheat like that? How much? Who knows?

Cue the chorus of “but steroids are different, because they are magical pills that automatically make you stronger without working hard, and being stronger and more muscular makes you a vastly better hitter, and that’s why great hitters all look like NFL nose tackles, and only hitters take steroids, and they only started doing it in the late 1990s, and therefore other the many other kinds of cheating that have been in place for as long as there has been baseball don’t matter at all, blah blah blah blah.”

The MSM in sports is dying. They disaparge statistics they can’t (and won’t take time to) understand. They disparage people that don’t agree with them (yes, I’m a pot here…..). They don’t bother to look at the nuances of what other people write (which is ironic, as many of them think of themselves as deep, intellectual types). And, also ironically, many of them now have blogs and appear on tv and radio (mediums they spend all kinds of time ripping).

This is just another example of why MSM is dying for many of us (heck, I’m 45, not some youngster). They are only interested in what generates news, not in what is news. They are more and more interested in making the news, and not in reporting the news. They are more and more interested in short cuts to loud yelling and controversy, than they are in intellectual debate (maybe I’m delusional in thinking the press was ever any other way).

This is the kind of thing that makes me read Joe and Gleeman and others, and not buy newspapers or watch local news (or even CNN and Fox) much anymore….and that makes me wonder how we’ll ever have news and reporting that moves our nation forward in terms of discussing important issues (and damn, that post is long and moralistic).