My Take on Baseball’s PED Issue

I was talking with a friend of mine over the weekend and the subject of David Ortiz and PEDs came up. This friend is a Yankee fan and he tried to spin the story as a situation that taints the Red Sox World Series win that broke the curse of the bambino. (Though I say that he’s a Yankee fan I also must add the disclaimer that many baseball fans who don’t root for the Yankees have felt the same way.) A year ago I may have agreed with this statement but I’ve grown to be jaded by reports of players using PEDs.

The fact is that just because we now know certain players performances were enhanced it doesn’t mean that actual game outcomes have been affected in a large way. I’m becoming more and more of the opinion that for every player we know who was (is?) juicing there are probably two that we don’t know about. And there is probably an equal number of players on each team that are jucing (or close to it). What this means is that while individual statistics have been inflated, the proliferation of players under the influence even out team statistics and game outcomes were probably not affected very much.

With the reports of people on the 2003 juicing list leaking out in dribs and drabs I will not be surprised if any of my favorite players are on the list. Do I care? Certainly. Do I think it really affect the game? Only in the PR sense.

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