Baseball fans reacted more with a yawn than a gasp Thursday as a 20-month investigation made it official: Baseball has been soiled by performance-enhancing drugs, and not just a little.
“So what?” Terry Simpson, a utility company lineman, said at Buffalo Wild Wings Grill & Bar in Englewood as a news conference on ster-oid use in baseball played on screens normally dedicated to hitting and fielding.
“Baseball is entertainment. It is.”
At the ESPN Zone in downtown Denver, Tom Laughlin, a computer programmer from Lakewood, said, “If this moves us closer to having this over with, then yippee. Otherwise, it’s just a few more names I didn’t know before.”
Near the bar, Grant Johnston, a salesman from Houston, interrupted his pitch to businessman Greg Flobeck of Monument.
“It’s done. It’s over,” Johnston said of the drug use outlined in the report. “If it helps them hit the ball farther, then who does it hurt besides the player?”
Flobeck could muster no outrage one way or the other.
“You don’t want it to get down to the kids,” as the report’s author, former Sen. George Mitchell, had suggested earlier. “Then that’s a bad thing. But in a lot of cases it already has. They need to do what they need to do to stop that.”
Mario Coronado, a salesman from Longmont, watched the news conference on a smaller screen behind the bar as he waited to pay his tab with a credit card.
“It’s a historic day in baseball,” he said. “Anytime you have the commissioner on TV live defending the sport, that’s significant.”
It won’t keep Coronado, a lifelong baseball fan, from the park, he said.
“I don’t care. I still love baseball.”
That feeling seems to prevail throughout the game, as the sport has set attendance records several times in recent seasons, including this past year, despite all the talk of performance enhancing drugs. Commissioner Bud Selig said after the World Series that Major League Baseball produced a record $6 billion in revenue this past season.
Bonds not “only bad boy”
The news was barely a base hit at the Grand Slam Sports Cafe in Centennial. Fans spoke more of fantasy league football.
Occasionally the crawl on the TV screen would provide a new name — Roger Clemens, Andy Pettitte, Lenny Dykstra — that would catch the attention of the late lunchtime crowd.
“Well, Barry Bonds isn’t the only bad boy, is he?” said Jose Manguez, a Denver resident raised in the San Francisco Bay area. “The media sure likes to pick and choose its villains. Barry Bonds is the greatest hitter, and he gets an asterisk. Roger Clemens is the greatest pitcher, who’s bigger and better at 40 than he was at 25, and nobody says boo.”
Curtis Nichols of Centennial, a baseball fan since 1948, said all guilty players should be banned for life.
“Sure enough, there have always been scumbags in baseball, but the answer is not amnesty,” said the 71-year-old. “The answer is punishment. Ban them for life, the way guilty people have been done in the past.
“If baseball is really worried about the lesson they’re teaching young kids, then don’t say cheating is forgivable.”
Joey Bunch: 303-954-1174 or jbunch@denverpost.com
