I have been thinking about Baseball,
The Mitchell Report, Barry Bonds, and Roger Clemens. All I can say is lets retire the phrase "Greatest of All Time."
I have been one of the fans that really got down on the steroids era. I see everyone that did steroids as cheating. Even if baseball was not testing for steroids, they were against the rules since 1991.
They are cheaters, but they do not own the fault, not even most of the fault. The League, the office of the commissioner, and the union all have more fault that the individual players. They did not protect the players. In fact they went the other direction and enabled and encouraged this behavior.
I also blame the media. I am not sure why reporters did not dig into this earlier. The word was going around the clubhouse. No one was on the record, but a good reporter could have found some of the truth. It is like the news media thought it was better to keep the clubhouse code of silence.
I do not have a footnote for this story, I remember when Lenny Dykstra, came back from his plagued seasons of 1991 and 1992. In a clubhouse interview he made a comment about eating his vitamins as a joke. Everyone who heard that that clip knew that Dykstra was talking about steroids. Since there was no testing at that time no one did anything.
Gary Cobb did a whole show on WIP in Philadelphia about steroids. I wonder why no one covering baseball full time picked up on this.
In light of how many players took steroids, it is truly a whole generation of players who took part of this. The report was full of All Star players. It was at the heart of the game. I am starting to soften on the idea that these players do not deserve to be in the Hall of Fame. I have gone from no not any them to kind of no.
What I would ask of the media and of sports fans, lets retire the title of "Greatest of All Time." I am not saying that we cannot call a player great or amazing. Lets just not crown them the Greatest of all time in any category. Not the greatest hitter, the greatest pitcher, and not the greatest player. I do not care how many stats they rack up, how any MVPs or Cy Young awards they win. No longer can a new player or a player in the game right now be the greatest of all time.
I am not sure what Tim Kurchin is going to do on baseball tonight if he can no longer say a player is the greatest of all time. He might not know what do with himself, but he will find another way to say a player is great.
From here on out I think Willie Mays is the greatest player of all time. He was the best player in the best era of baseball. Lets leave it at that.
Labels: Barry Bonds, baseball, gary cobb, media, mitchell report, sports, steroids, tag overload
