Okay. Here goes a touchy subject, the Hall of Fame and PEDs. Every year, the players who are HOF candidates that tested positive, were suspended, or just suspected of being users and they get more press than the clean players. Why not?
It is a story about something bad and we now live in a society where bad things on the morning news, afternoon news, evening news, 11 o’clock news and 24 hour news, dominate the stories of everyday occurrences. Count how many bad ones you hear today versus good ones.
When a ballplayer, after 20- years of playing this game, beginning with ’T” ball, finally figures out how to play at the big league level and is doing great, we will start to hear things like, “He must be juicing”.
Which robs us of the picture in our head, of the amazing things we see him do on the field. Having that put in the back of our minds, is cheating us out of feeling something special and something that makes us happy.
God forbid we can be made to feel happy after a bad day at work. Bad ugly news sells papers, (what’s a paper?)
We have become inundated with bad news and seem to have excepted it as normal. The ‘new normal’. Long gone are the days, of professional athletes being our Idols. We anticipate their fall from grace, thinking it’s only a matter of time before someone will catch them doing something wrong.
Fortunately, the cheaters are in the minority with the ones who play by the rules keeping the game strong.
When I look at the PED candidates for the 2017 HOF, I just shake my head and wonder, what the heck were they thinking about? They would of made it without the drugs, right? We can’t even assume PEDs were not used by these knuckleheads before they were drafted.
We will never know the truth about these gifted athletes, who thrill us on the field. They are doomed to be outside looking in at the game they worked so hard at to become stars.
I just wish the whole thing fades away, like the baseball cocaine era of the 80s. Well I think that went away. I mean, guys can’t be doing drugs, right? It has no performance enhancing results and it is just not as good of a story, as PEDs.
There are plenty of good baseball stories to write about, so I apologize for this rant about all bad things. We love watching sports and spend a ton of money to do that. It is what makes us happy. We all deserve to be happy well except for the Dodgers for moving out of Brooklyn.
Happy New Year!