Witch Hunts and Double Standards

It's been a looooooong hiatus. It was unavoidable, but I suppose it is just as well because the current offseason has been a depressing one. The talk has been of steroid use and HGH and tarnished legacies as baseball continues to get the short end of a double standard in sports. Shawn Merriman uses performance enhancing drugs and it is barely news for a week, a baseball player uses and his world comes tumbling down around him. With Clemens now accused it becomes likely that the best hitter and pitcher of my lifetime thus far seem to have been using, if the allegations are in fact true. I am no fan of the personalities of Clemens or Bonds, but it is still frustrating as a baseball fan to see it all come to this.

In large part the way that Selig and the rest of baseball are trying to get clean is unfair. Every honest report indicates that the owners, Selig included, knew what was happening all those years, and now that they are losing face they are conducting witch hunts to try to clean up their legacy. It isn't that I think those who cheated don't deserve to have history remember that, it's just that reports such as the Mitchell report seem biased in that they only implicate players close to one or two men. So, since the two men who provided the bulk of the testimony for the Mitchell report happened to work for the Yankees and Mets, most of the players whose names came up played for the Yankees and Mets. If the two men had worked for the White Sox and Cubs the same would be true for those two teams. Sadly, what is clear now is that the use of performance enhancing drugs has been widespread and rampant for some time... then again I suppose that has been clear for a while now.

If it weren't for all the steroid/HGH news that has dominated the baseball scene this would have been a pretty fun offseason thus far. While, even as a Yankee fan, I am getting sick of hearing about where Johan Santana may or may not land (as a baseball fan I think it is probably best if he doesn't end up on either team, but that is best saved for another blog in the event it actually happens), there has still been a return in baseball of the old fashioned trade, we've seen a lot of players change uniforms thus changing the landscape of the game and most importantly we've seen an important player like Jake Peavy actually looking to stay with his small market team, indicating that at least a few teams are running an honest business rather than pocketing huge amounts of stadium revenue and revenue sharing.

Unfortunately, the shadow of performance enhancing drugs will hover over the game for a long time to come, which for people like me is frustrating indeed.