The soundtrack to baseball’s steroid era has been silence.
Now, slowly and painfully, major-leaguers are beginning to speak their minds. Sort of.
“It’s disappointing for everyone who plays baseball — not just the players, but the management, ownership, commissioner. It’s a bad time for the game,” Yankees captain Derek Jeter told reporters in New York as teammate Roger Clemens took the stand on Capitol Hill.
Doesn’t it seem odd that so few players have expressed outrage at what steroids and human growth hormone have done to the grand old game and its legacy?
If your profession had been tarnished, wouldn’t you want to shout out loud in order to protect it? If you were a journeyman waiting for your chance to make the show, wouldn’t you howl in protest knowing others cheated you out of a job?
That seems logical, but it’s not baseball’s way.
Like big-city beat cops, players live by a code. They have each other’s backs. Squealing clubhouse rats are considered lower than cockroaches. It’s not surprising that most players balked when they were asked to cooperate with former Sen. George Mitchell’s investigation.
Aside from Curt Schilling, most players publicly supported Barry Bonds. In most players’ eyes, Bonds’ immense talent excused everything else he did.
A reporter asking a player or manager about what drugs have done to the game is likely to get, “No comment,” or “It’s time to move on.”
Wednesday, Rockies reliever Matt Herges came clean, admitting he took performance-enhancing drugs. He also admitted he was wrong when he declined to talk to Mitchell’s investigators.
“It was ultimately my decision. Nobody said, ‘Don’t do it, don’t talk to them.’ To say that nobody else was talking, that’s a total cop-out, that’s a cowardly way of going about it,” Herges said.
Of course, Herges went public only after he was named in the Mitchell report. And only one active player, Jason Giambi, talked with Mitchell’s investigators.
Which leads to a couple of conclusions. One, the use of steroids and HGH was so widespread players were afraid of incriminating themselves or their buddies. Two, baseball’s code of silence was more important than cleaning up the game the players love.
Either way, baseball’s charms have been drowned out by the sounds of scandal.
