from Amazon
Thursday, December 20, 2007
Will Carroll speaks
Let’s listen. He also addresses corticosteroids as it related to Sandy Koufax. Last year, I brought up Sandy issue as it related to Kirk Gibson. I was going to write this to Will, but I’ll post it here, and hopefully Will will see it too:
Will, good article. You should write more articles of this type.
As for corticosteroids (i.e., Kirk Gibson’s The Natural moment), what makes that drug less bad than steroids or hGH? As of at least a year ago, the Gibson drug was on the WADA banned list (though some countries were asking for its removal). So, clearly there are some “inner circle Hall of Fame” drugs where it will be banned for the next 100 years, and there’s fringe drugs that undergo debate. At one point, Andro for example was banned by Health Canada, IOC, NFL, but not MLB. I suppose the Gibson drug is one of those fringe drugs. How do I know that hGH is not in the same class? And where do greenies fall in all this? Wouldn’t some sort of classification system be better, so we can distinguish between lifting a $1.39 cigarette lighter (slap on wrist), stealing a $139,000 car (bad), and embezzelling $139 million (slap on wrist)?
Sorry to see that this post didn’t get much attention Tango. I concur 100%. I find the moralization process fascinated and completely confusing. Why is cortisone OK but HGH bad? Are “greenies” worse than caffeine? I don’t want to blame the press as specific people, but the institution itself seems to have an immense ability to color the conversation.
Certain actions are condoned and others are demonized when in practice they are remarkably similar. We end up adopting positions on right and wrong that seem ignorant and arbitrary at best, maliciously misleading at worst. There simply seems to be a lack of coherent logic for what makes actions good or bad and to what degree.
Furthermore, the context matters. Is doing a cocaine a performance issue, a character issue, or a non-issue? Isn’t just calling it “bad” a gross simplification? Why is Josh Hamilton being lauded for his comeback from hard drug abuse while Tim Raines gets knocked down a peg for it? A fascinating topic that I think will continue to be explored as we struggle to place the most recent era of the game in the proper perspective.