To all those sportswriters
reacting to yesterday’s Mark McGwire/Sammy Sosa “Long Gone Summer” documentary
on ESPN—if you say, “They cheated,” that means you all see sports as something more than entertainment, yes?
Because, if baseball is just
entertainment, there have to be a whole bunch of actors out there who used PEDs
to bulk up to help their careers. How
would that be different? You can’t have
it both ways, guys, you can’t say it’s entertainment and then complain when the
entertainers do something to better fit the part.
And can we stop saying the 1998
homerun chase “saved” baseball? How do
you know that for sure? It’d be more accurate
to say that McGwire and Sosa pointed the way to a particular style of
play. Call them the grand-daddies of
launch angle, if you want, just don’t call them saviors.
Think about it. There’s a straight line from 1998 to where
baseball is today. The only difference
is that hitters can’t use chemically-produced muscle to achieve the launch
angle, exit velocity and stats the analytics’ crowd so loves. That stuff is killing baseball, but I was the
kind of fan who never thought much of McGwire and Sosa back in the day. What do I know?
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