Silence on steroids issue speaks volumes

So, in my room I have a book, The Sporting News Baseball Record Book from 1999. On the front of the book it reads, “updated to include the historic 1998 season.” Not only is Mark McGuire on the cover, but on the spine is a nice, big headshot of Barry Bonds.
Isn’t it funny how just 10 years ago Bonds and McGuire were heroes and nobody questioned their off-field actions? Looking through the book made me think of one of my favourite sports movies of all-time, 61*, an HBO movie from a few years back about Roger Maris breaking Babe Ruth’s single-season home run record.
The movie ended with McGuire breaking Maris’ record in 1998. It was a weird thing to see in the midst of all the steroid talk that’s been going on since the Mitchell Report came out and made me remember all the hype that surrounded McGuire and Sammy Sosa in the summer of ’98.
The whole issue of major players using performance-enhancing substances is nothing new, we became aware of McGuire using androstinedione during the home run chase but, because it wasn’t a banned substance in the MLB, everyone just sort of ignored it.
Could you imagine if a story like that broke today? Andro is a muscle enhancer, banned by the NFL and the IOC, yet everyone looked the other way when it came out that McGuire was taking it. How did this happen? How can baseball have such an extreme turnaround when it comes to their athletes and performance enhancing drugs? Is it just that so many players were discovered to be taking these drugs or is it that going after McGuire in ’98 would have killed the league.
Think back to the mid 1990s and how baseball was going through something similar to what the NHL is experiencing now. The strike of 1994 pretty much killed the league throughout America; people just stopped caring about the game when they realized that the owners of the league didn’t care about them. But then people started hitting home runs and all of a sudden, and baseball became America’s national pastime once again. McGuire and Sosa were under round-the-clock observation for their efforts and we all watched to see if one of baseball’s most hallowed records could be broken.
So then, why is it that only 10 years ago we didn’t care what drugs our players were on and we just wanted to watch a ball get launched out of a stadium? It’s because the home run chase saved baseball, without it no one would have gone back to the games to watch McGuire and Sosa, and even to a lesser extent, Ken Griffey Jr. I’m not debating who is or who is not on steroids, we know what the Mitchell Report said and, honestly, whoever is taking the drugs at this point is irrelevant, it’s a problem and it needs to be dealt with.
The issue is that the problem could have been dealt with years ago, but baseball needed its stars so badly that they decided to let it slide. It was the same back in the 60s with guys like Mickey Mantle and Ty Cobb. Mantle was a known alcoholic and drug abuser and Cobb is widely known as the dirtiest player of all-time. Cobb was known to sharpen his cleats and then slide into players when he was running the base paths. Yet for all of this, baseball never took any action against these players because they needed athletes in the limelight.
Maybe this is why Bud Selig has been so quiet through the whole steroid investigation. Maybe deep down Selig knows that he could have made this all go away, and maybe he wouldn’t be remembered as the commissioner that oversaw one of the worst disgraces that major sports has ever seen. But, here we are now, and Selig has to lie in the bed that he has made.