ESPN.com – Gammons: Motown revival
Gammons’ take on the Magglio signing and the competitiveness of the AL Central doesn’t offer much that is new, though I didn’t realize the Tigers had offered more money to Edgar Renteria, Adrian Beltre and JD Drew than each accepted elsewhere.
More interesting is his nuanced assessment of the Canseco accusations, at least as they’ve been reported so far. I’m not sure why he’s so sure GW Bush didn’t know about Canseco’s steroid use in 1992, as Canseco says, but clearly there are plenty of reasons to distrust Canseco’s memory.
And motivation.
What’s really interesting is Gammons equating steroid use with past spit-balling and corking. I’ve made a similar argument about competition and cheating, though I think this exact parallel is far from perfect. What is really necessary is to decide how we’re going to talk about the things that have happened in the past.
Talk of Whitey Ford and Gaylord Perry usually reference their cheating, without disregarding all their achievements, some of which came because of it. The same happens now with Mark McGwire, and as more details surface other steroid and hormone users will be tagged. The baseball statistics we adore have never been free of taint anyway, and we’ll eventually get used to some sort of imperfect steroid translations. We have to.