Yesterday when the A-Rod steroid story broke, my immediate response was surprise. That lasted a second and then it occurred to me. I am not shocked by any of these stories anymore. In fact, I don’t know why anyone would be. I guess I would be shocked if I found out that Jamey Carroll was juicing. Or maybe, I might be surprised if I found out that Sal Fasano was slamming back doses of HGH. But the shock of some elite level player having gained an edge chemically is non-existent at this point. I think it is time to be honest with ourselves.
Now this isn’t to say that it isn’t wrong. It most certainly is. But that, in and of itself doesn’t have to drive our reactions. We have already gone through phases of realizing that the game of baseball doesn’t have a crystal clean background. How much more realization can we go through than having Rafael Palmeiro’s fake denial? We already saw a balding, slightly less bigger Mac sitting in front of legislators avoiding questions about the past. And this was way before his scummy brother decided to shop a tell-all book about how he introduced his brother Mark to the methods of juicing.
Then last year, we acted shocked again when the revelations about Andy Pettite and Roger Clemens came out. I think this was mostly because Clemens was the highest profile pitcher to engage in a practice that had been thought to be reserved for homerun obsessed power dudes who wanted to grind bats into splinters with their hands. Meanwhile, we were so obsessed with the sport and whether or not this dude cheated at a game that we like to watch, that the fact that he might have cheated on his wife with an underage girl became the secondary story. Now, if this story was touching your life, which would be more important. The fact that some guy cheated at baseball or the fact that he was (allegedly) having a romantic relationship with a 15 year-old?
So can we put a moratorium on shock and intrigue and officially move on? Yes, this includes if any of the Cleveland guys get named in that list of 104 players that was supposed to be confidential before A-Rod’s name popped into the news this week. Think about it honestly. Would it matter to you at this point if you found out that some guy cheated in 2003? The story is old. We assume with the drop in homeruns last year that the testing program is working for the most part and the cheating has been at least slowed down if not stopped.
The reason that I write this at all is that I really want to watch baseball for the game itself. Much like I have decided to stop caring about the year 2010 as it relates to Lebron so that I can concentrate on this amazing season, I don’t want to distract myself from a year of Tribe baseball. Certainly I don’t want to miss the natural storylines of division races, wildcard races, individual statistical achievements and the like just so I can help the (bored?) national media continue down the road toward tabloid-ization of all my favorite sports. On top of that, if the Tribe does have a chance to get to the playoffs, this state of mind will remove the ammunition from media guns that might, say, want to report Paul Byrd HGH results in the middle of the ALCS.