Jose "the Juice" Canseco and his Traveling All 'Roid Team...

As I wrote on Saturday, the steroid era has reached the gates to the Hall of Fame, which means we can now look forward to at least five years of steroid related histrionics, morality speeches, and what not, but for those of us with Sports on the Brain, it also offers something else. A little time to ponder how an All ‘Roid Team would look. Who would we pick? Are there enough players linked to drugs to create an all star type team? Or are they mostly first basemen? Well, as it turns out, things are looking pretty positive for us in this pursuit, just as the tests of these dudes would have looked pretty positive had any of them peed into a cup during the late nineties or early millennium. This is all in fun, so nobody should go into a ‘Roid induced rage. We acknowledge that most of these guys have never tested positive, nor will they. However, they have all been linked one way or another to drugs.

C - A surefire Hall of Famer, Ivan Rodriguez has grown into a well respected elder statesman, the result of his work with the 2002 Marlins and last year’s Detroit Tigers, but lets be realistic here: Pudge played in Texas with Jose Canseco, the great steroid distributor. As if that weren’t enough, Canseco dropped his name in his articulate, factual tell-all book, Juiced: Wild Times, Rampant 'Roids, Smash Hits & How Baseball Got Big. Now, lets be honest, Canseco isn’t exactly the world’s greatest witness. His recounting of things, is, perhaps, a bit surreal, but Pudge didn’t do his reputation any favors when he reported to camp in 2005 (the first season with testing) looking more like Nicole Ritchie than Hulk Hogan. Suspicious? Sure, but we here at Achanceyougottatake Sports judge not, we are just happy to have such a great catcher on the team.

1B – Pick your poison. Do you want something lighter and breaded, like a McChicken, something meatier like the Quarter Pounder, or do you just want to go traditional and get yourself a Big Mac? First base is the Mecca for steroid use: you have one guy who wont talk about the past, one who apologizes for… something(?), and another who brazenly asserts that he never used steroids, and… promptly fails a test two months later (oops, my bad!). I mean, obviously any All ‘Roid team is going to be from the modern America League, which means that we get to pick ourselves a hulking DH as well as a hulking first baseman, so lets take the best two of these three wieners, err… I mean burgers. Without that guilty test, Rafael Palmeiro would have been a surefire Hall of Famer, as he’s the fifth man to ever reach three thousand hits and five hundred home runs. But lets face it, his marks are built more on longevity than good wholesome mashing power. And nothing doesn’t say All ‘Roid team like the word longevity. Giambi had some good years, two in fact that were extremely good, but this category is really all about the BIG MAC and Mark McGwire. With 583 home runs in only 6187 at bats, Big Mac is top of the heap all time in home runs per at bat. That’s right, better than Ruth, better than Aaron, even better than that Giant Head out West. Obviously with that kind of production, McGwire’s our man. Maybe Giambi can DH and Palmeiro can point fingers at kids in the stands.


2B – Where in the world little old Bret Boone gained his ‘roid link I don’t know, but one day he was a middling utility infielder and the next, at 31, he was a power hitting number three hitter who (bonus) just happened to be a second baseman. Should we judge him on his sudden increase in home runs? Or his .200 point improvement in OPS? Or his incredible decline in that magic summer of 2005? However we judge him, I think it’s pretty obvious that Booney’s our two bagger.

SS – Well, he played with Mark McGwire, Jason Giambi, and Rafael Palmeiro. Worse, he also played with Jose “just bend over and drop you pants, while I poke something pointy into you” Canseco. Worst yet, when Palmeiro went tits up, he cast blame upon Miguel Tejada for injecting him with “B12” shots… Hhmmm… well, it’s just not good any time somebody’s suggesting that you injected them with something, anything. It just doesn’t matter what. Shots are for Doctors and those incredible little nurses who make such great girlfriends… (and Mothers… and, er, uhmmm… I guess Fathers, even though he’s bald). Anyhow, Tejada’s numbers haven’t appreciably changed one way or the other, nor has he ever had any other association with drugs, but a little game of hide the pointy thing with Palmeiro, hey, that’s how quickly these things can turn sour in the ‘Roid Era.

3B – This team obviously needs some leadership and despite all his demons -- demons which ultimately claimed his life -- Ken Caminiti had a moxie which all of his teammates rallied around. He was a huge presence in the clubhouse and that, plus his role in bringing the steroid issue out of the closet and to the forefront of discussion makes him our team captain.

RF – Another bastion of ‘Roid happy players. Sammy Sosa is the only man to hit more than 60 home runs three times. Gary Sheffield was hanging out with Barry Bonds one summer, when Bonds started rubbing a clear substance on Shef’s leg… Might have been drugs, might have been moisturizer, might have been one of those “happy” moments between teammates that are best left behind closed doors. Then there’s Juan Gonzalez who had a couple incredible years, years in which he won a pair of MVPs. He also happened to play with a certain Surreal someone… And finally, we have the grand Daddy of them all, that surreal, leopard skin undie wearing, book writing, name dropping, Cuban heartthrob:

Apparently, Jose Canseco was doing the drugs as early as 1988, making him the Flava Flav of steroid use. He also claims to have personally stuck his needle in McGwire, Gonzalez, Palmeiro, Rodriguez, Dave Martinez, Tony Saunders, and Wilson Alvarez, while also pointing a judging finger at Giambi, Barry Bonds, Sosa, Boone, Brady Anderson and Tejada. So, if he’s not actually on the team, well, he has to be the General Manager.

CF – Ok, we just dropped his name (or really, we just quoted Canseco dropping his name, but who’s keeping score anyhow), so what about Brady Anderson? He was a gritty, gutsy player, who one year hit 16 home runs and the next hit 50… Huh? What? Well, I’m not much with the math-er-a-matics, but I think, I think that’s a difference of, ahhh… well a big difference anyhow. The next year he was back down to 18. Nice. So, obviously Brady used for a year and then decided that he wasn’t wild about allowing Canseco to wave things around his backside.

LF – Let me introduce our starting left fielder, Mr. Barry Lamar Bonds! (wild, crazy applause) He’s good, but just wait, like the Reebok Pump, you just tug on his ear, his head inflates to seven times its original size and he’s the Mohammed Ali of Baseball.

RHP – Well he never played with Canseco (actually, I have to look this up, they both played so long, for so many different teams that I find it hard to imagine they never played a year in the same place… just wait… still waiting… BAM! Money!). Ok, scratch that first sentence, Canseco was in the locker room with Roger Clemens in Boston when Clemens was looking finished in 1995, and he was there in Toronto when Clemens was winning back to back Cy Young’s in 1997. Clemens is a notorious work out warrior, and obviously an incredibly gifted athlete, but… What he’s done in Houston these past three years, well, if they don’t raise an eyebrow then you’ve been in a coma for the last five years. It’s a sign of what has happened that I’ve passed the point of surprise when it comes to these guys. If Clemens was conclusively indicated with steroids, not just name dropped by Jason Grimsely, I’d barely bat an eye. The indifference is sad and the only surprising thing left.

LHP – Considering that they’re best friends, work out together, wife swap, and make all other decisions together (ok, maybe that wife swap comment was an exaggeration), well... a guilty tip of the hat for Clemens is a guilty tip of the hat for Andy Pettitte. And given his postseason histrionics, we're happy to have the lefty.

Well, you can’t pick a team without giving a lineup, so here’s how I would plug in my Drugged up team of sluggers (They are listed here with their most ‘roid-irific season):

1) B. Anderson (lh) - .297 AVG, .396 OBP, .637 SLG, 51 HR, 110 RBI, 8.67 RC/27.
2) B. Boone (rh) - .331, .372, .578, 37, 141, 8.02.
3) B. Bonds (lh) - .362, .609, .812, 45, 101, 20.11.
4) M. McGwire (rh) - .299, .470, .752, 70, 147, 13.10.
5) J. Giambi (lh) - .342, .477, .660, 38, 120, 11.89.
6) S. Sosa (rh) - .328, .437, .737, 64, 160, 12.38.
7) K. Caminiti (s) - .326, .408, .621, 40, 130, 9.43.
8) M. Tejada (rh) - .311, .360, .534, 34, 150, 6.90.
9) I. Rodriguez (rh) - .347, .375, .667, 27, 83, 9.37.

Sure this team would have some obscene pharmaceutical bills and granted most of these guys couldn’t run any longer because they suffered from mysterious joint deterioration, but with all those balls flying over the fence, who cares. Even if they arrived onto the field late for every game, because they were all crammed into one of the bathroom stalls, well we’d still love them, because they’d score more than Wilt Chamberlain at a Dixie Chicks concert. Nobody hates a champion, unless of course that champion’s the Yankees. Damn, this team would be the Yankees wouldn’t it?

Banging on the gates of the Hall of the Sordid...

And so it begins… after two years of waiting, baseball’s steroid era finally reaches the Hall of Fame and the men who sit in wait of their moment to cast judgment. Mark McGwire retired first, which means he’s the ice breaker. He’s the man who gets to stand up in front of the jury and take the first lobs of condemnation, of hurt, even of disgust. There will be more to follow, Sammy Sosa and Rafael Palmeiro will come, and leave, together, Roger Clemens will be a sure-fire first ballot choice, but his election will be met with raised eyebrows by some, and of course there’s that cheerful guy out West who did things with a bat that not even the great Babe Ruth had done. What’s at stake? Depends whom you ask. It could be glory in the whimsical tails of baseball lore all encapsulated with a golden image of yourself in baseball’s eternal shrine, or it could just be a bronze plaque in a small city called Cooperstown. It matters only because it is the ultimate judgment of the men who are deemed to have allowed drugs to ruin the integrity of the American past time. Of course the people who are truly at fault for that, the power men in suits who broker the deals, create the laws, and blindly ignored what happened, well, maybe the steroid issue will come up if Bud Selig is ever seriously considered for the Hall. Instead, McGwire stands now in judgment. And judgment is what the voters intend to lay down.

Yet, the moral indignation emanating from the gatekeepers of baseball’s cherished hall is thick and pungent with the air of hypocrisy. After all, these are the men who spend every day in baseball locker rooms. These are the men who have spent the last fifteen years talking with clean and dirty players alike and yet it is these same men who remained quiet, or fooled, until Ken Caminiti spoke openly of the issue with Sports Illustrated’s Tom Verducci. Now they intend to expunge their guilt by withholding McGwire’s place from the Hall of Fame. Whatever one might think of the writer’s, are they right? Does McGwire deserve to sit for immortality amongst Babe Ruth, Lou Gherig, Ted Williams, Joe DiMaggio, Jackie Robinson, Willie Mays, and Roberto Clemente?

Whatever else people want to make this Hall of Fame vote about, there are only two relevant questions here: 1) Did Mark McGwire use steroids? 2) Should that prevent him from residing in the Hall of Fame? I think that the answer to the first is, d’uh. A couple of things annoy me here: first, McGwire’s pathetic and weak display in front of congress; and second, people who say, “well there was never any proof he used steroids.” There wouldn’t have been any proof that he used drugs, because he played in an era where, executives, managers, writers, and fans ignored the possibility and failed to demand that players were tested. Yes, we live in a civilization in which people are innocent until proven guilty… in a court of law. Nobody’s prosecuting McGuire in a lawful court. Instead they’re trying to understand how he fits in with baseball’s history (and lets be clear that history is an extremely sordid one, including horrible racists, glorified alcoholics, noted philanders, all sorts of elaborate cheating, and even a gambler or two). McGwire is being tried in the court of public opinion and that court heeds not the shackles of facts, but deals instead in something inherently shadier, although occasionally more accurate. For instance, gut reaction: is O.J. Simpson a murderer, did Bill Clinton have sex with that woman, and should Britney Spears be held accountable for me ever hearing the name Kevin Federline? Of course the answer to all three is yes. We don’t need the evidence first. Common sense stands up, the evidence can follow after. We don’t need proof that McGwire used steroids, he needs proof he didn’t. Proof he does not have.

How does McGwire’s steroid use affect whether or not he should be in the Hall of Fame? I’ve spent more than a year fairly sure that when the time came I would argue that McGwire shouldn’t be enshrined. That by cheating he somehow denigrated the game, betrayed those that came before him, and padded his numbers. The third point is tricky. While it’s indisputable that McGwire got a lift from the drugs, given the guilty tests of journeymen like Alex Sanchez (a weak hitting outfielder), Juan Rincon, Rafael Betancourt, and Ryan Franklin (all below average pitchers), it’s hard to put McGwire’s use into context. And while I can confidently say that McGwire used steroids, can I confidently say that Cal Ripken didn’t. I mean, I feel fairly certain, but can you say definitively? Does Brady Anderson’s 50 home runs in 1996 mean he was using steroids, or does it just represent a Roger Maris-like career year? What about Rich Aurilia’s 37 home runs in 2001, on the same team, in the same year that Barry Bonds was hitting 73. That’s twice as many homers as any other year in Aurilia’s career. The result of hitting in the same lineup as Bonds (the “better pitch” corollary)? Or the result of being on the same team as Bonds (the “what happens in the clubhouse, stays in the clubhouse” corollary)? What about Bret Boone, who jumped from a .747 OPS in 2000, to a .950 OPS in 2001, at the age of 32. Can we read anything into Boone hitting 37, 24, 35, 24 home runs from ’01 to ’04, and then only 7 in ’05 when baseball finally had testing, or was he just a 36 year old middle infielder? And this doesn’t even acknowledge the slippery slope of investigating pitchers. We just don’t know anything from the ubiquitous steroid era. Nothing.

What we do know is that in 1994 greedy owners locked out greedy players and a season in which Tony Gwynn was threatening to hit .400, Greg Maddux was threatening to keep his ERA under 1.50, and the Expos were threatening to win the National League East ended abruptly without a World Series. The result? Fans abandoned the national past time, in droves. Like the rich leaving the Titanic, baseball was going down. A year later Cal Ripken brought some goodwill to the game by showing that some players just want to show up and play ball every day, but the sport was still falling by the wayside in the sporting public’s mind. American athletes were playing football, basketball, and even (gasp) soccer over baseball, and the fans weren’t going to the stadiums or watching on TV. What changed? What brought the prosperity which now means that teams have enough money to shell out 136 million for Alfonso Soriano? Nothing, really. Except of course a glorious summer in 1998 during which two gregarious “giants” took aim at Roger Maris and the magic number 61. We held our collective breaths for an entire summer as Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire swatted home run after home run, after home run. We laughed with Sammy as he sprinted out to right field every inning, mimicked him as he kissed his heart and god after every home run, and we cherished McGwire, as he brought his son along for every home run. Big Mac reminded us all that what really matters are the children; that to the benefit of the children, broken families can put aside their differences, just as he did when he brought his son, his ex-wife, and her new husband onto the national stage to celebrate that 62nd home run. It isn’t over the top to say that the home run chase in 1998 saved baseball, and for that we owe McGwire (and Sosa for that matter). Does he owe us? Absolutely. He owes us the truth, he owes us a return to public life in which he remembers that the children matter over everything else, even his lasting image.

Mark McGwire did more to bring baseball back from the strike than anybody else. That’s what changed my mind, but I want an acknowledgement of steroid use. He needs to talk about the past, he needs to work hard to ensure that no children take the path he took. That they understand that by using steroids, he seriously risked permanent damage to his body, or even drug dependency. The dependency that ultimately stole Ken Caminiti’s life. We cannot cast judgment upon McGwire’s actions, because by sharing in the glory of 1998, everyone in baseball from the Commissioner, to the head of the Players Union, the executives and the people who cover the game (the same ones now passing judgment) all used McGwire to attain what we wanted. Even when androstenedione was thrust into the public consciousness, we chose to ignore. There were no revealing exposes, until Caminiti came forward. For that we share in the culpability and we need to acknowledge our part, but McGwire needs to acknowledge and help heal the damage of what he did. When he does, then he deserves to join the hallowed halls which encapsulate the sordid history that makes baseball’s lore so thick and textured.