Dear Rick,
Now, you're quite the humanitarian, I know. I appreciate you playing 'roid judge and deciding on behalf of baseball fans everywhere exactly who played clean and who was riding dirty. But the fact is, you don't know. You don't know, because you didn't do your job.
While I agree with you that the BBWA should be ashamed for letting the steroid era go by without a single journalistic investigation, what were you doing at the time, covering tea parties for NPR?
Oh, that's right, you broke the big story (after Jose Canseco did your job for you): Sammy Sosa wouldn't pee in a cup when you asked him to. That wasn't journalism, Rick, that was a publicity stunt, a juvenile prank, a journalistic hack-job mugging. Yeah, a member of a union that has collectively argued for decades that drug testing is a violation of their rights should betray that agreement because you, Rick Reilly, sports writing god, have so graciously offered him the opportunity to clear his good name by filling up thine cup with urine. Surely the only explanation for his refusal is that he was on steroids at the moment of your grandstanding sneak attack. (Who knew it was possible to grandstand and wage a sneak attack in one fell swoop . . . congrats!)
Now, I have no proof that Sammy Sosa never used steroids. But your charade proves nothing either . . . well, except that you're a tool who used his standing as a sports writer to make himself the story. Well, Rick, if the story is cheap-shot artists who are too lazy and/or cowardly to ask the tough questions in private, congrats again, because you're it. In the meantime, if I were you, I would at least step outside of my glass house before I threw any more stones.
For now, you have two options. 1) You can sneak back into those houses and return the trophies, or 2) You can dig a little deeper and see if you can find old urine samples from every player in the league for every year that is in dispute.
Good luck with that, Rick. Yours sarcastically,
Adam
P.S. If Sosa's attempts at medicinal performance enhancement were anything like his bat-corking skills, he'd be dead by now.
This whole thing is stupid. Where does it stop? Take away their records. Fine. Take away their medals. Fine. Take away their money. Fine. But what about the teams that win the World Series? If they had a player who used PED, should they forfeit it? Should any team who ever had a player use PED forfeit the game that player played in? And if that's the case, would any game in ANY sport ever count again? Reilly is a douche, mostly because baseball isn't like track. They aren't like runners. It's not an individual sport. You can't claim that a baseball MVPs stats are ONLY due to his or her own effort. A homerun is the result of a good/crappy pitch (by a pitcher who may or may not be on 'roids, so does the fact that a 'roided hitter took a 'roided pitcher yard negate the 'roidedness?) called by a catcher, etc., etc. It's not like being a runner, where it's you against the world and your performance is contingent on nobody else (besides the wind). This whole thing is stupid. Rick Reilly is stupid. Because he's ALWAYS been the "guy" who writes things not because they're smart, but because he thinks he's so clever in saying them...
ReplyDeleteYeah. I'm done. No more steroid talk. (And I'm sick of the insinuation that there were only 104 players who used. No, there were 104 players with allegedly positive tests on one occasion that they tested when they knew they were being tested. The number is probably much higher.)
ReplyDeleteI guess I'm just sick of the general idea that these guys are all guilty of doing something that resulted in a penalty of . . . nothing. The game was practically designed in the 90s for steroids to be the norm. Now it's not. Somehow, I agree with Mark McGwire. I'm no longer going to talk about the past. Why didn't anybody listen to him?