Thank you, Alex Rodriguez. Thanks for forcing baseball to finally confront the hard truth about its drug problem.
The denying is done. This was far more than a nasty habit of ballooning biceps and inflated statistics. Performance-enhancing drugs defined the sport from 1985-2006. It is destined to forever be known as the Juiced Era.
Go ahead. Commission a Mount Rushmore of better baseball through chemistry. The faces of the game’s monumentally stupid vanity should be obvious: Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, Rodriguez and Bud Selig.
Everybody who loves the game now must ask: How should history, which baseball holds so dear, deal with a chronic drug habit bigger than Jose Canseco and his Bash Brother, Mark McGwire?
A letter of resignation from commissioner Selig, who turned a blind eye to it all, would be a good place to start.
Unfortunately, the rest of us would still be left to make a heartbreaking choice.
We can dismiss an entire era of baseball as a fraud and start rewriting the record book with scarlet letters.
Or we could grudgingly grant limited amnesty to abusers of PEDs, and allow the most worthy of our chemically enhanced heroes entrance to the Hall of Fame alongside the cheaters, carousers, bigots and tobacco-chewers already enshrined.
Angry voters and fans will be tempted to slam the doors of Cooperstown on Bonds, Clemens and Rodriguez forever. It’s a natural reaction born from a sense of betrayal so sickening it aches deep in the gut. But there are so many scoundrels in the steroids era that off-with-their-heads justice would cover the game in blood for decades.
A Hall of Fame without the home run king, the greatest living pitcher and the best active player would be a holy church of the righteous. But it also would cease to be a living history of the game if Bonds, Clemens and Rodriguez were banished for eternity.
Unlike Bonds and Clemens, who seem bent on denying any wrongdoing until their dying breaths, Rodriguez said he is sorry for taking PEDs from 2001-03, when he averaged 52 home runs per season for the Texas Rangers.
Confession was a savvy public-relations move by A-Rod, a 33-year-old slugger with plenty of time to win back the affection of fans. In America, we love to wallow in celebrity gossip, only to quickly forgive, as a cleansing act for the fallen hero, not to mention ourselves.
Little League parents, maybe even those who took a bong hit back in college long before Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps reached for the pipe, must react with predictable horror about how good role models are hard to find in sports these days.
But here’s what will make all those father-daughter and mother-son chats about steroids so difficult, though.
The drugs worked. Productivity went up. Everybody got rich. Damn the consequences. Isn’t that what matters most for an instant-gratification society?
Honestly, if Rodriguez could pop pills that would help make him the MVP and a billionaire, how hard do you think the decision really was?
In a country where pro sports are far from the only businesses that put profit ahead of ethics, baseball will now be forced to go far beyond its beloved numbers to determine entry into the Hall of Fame.
With his reputation built one mighty blast at a time, McGwire now seems as much Frankenstein monster as American folk hero. So why should Big Mac ever deserve a Hall pass?
Even with a mandatory deduction for juicing, however, it seems to me the careers of Bonds, Clemens and Rodriguez can be fairly evaluated against flawed eras of this sport’s long and checkered past, whether we’re talking something as relatively harmless as a dead baseball or as socially significant as segregation.
I want future generations of baseball lovers to see Bonds, Clemens and Rodriguez in the Hall of Fame, with plaques that include their heroic feats and human foibles, mentioning both the records broken and the drugs ingested in the pursuit of glory.
Sometimes, the most valuable history lessons come with the painful price of knowing the whole truth.
Mark Kiszla: 303-954-1053 or mkiszla@denverpost.com
