TUCSON — After shooting up with steroids and taking a bat to his sport’s integrity, if drug abuser Alex Rodriguez really wants to make things right in baseball, a good place to start is by keeping alive the memory of a teenage pitcher who died cheating.
“I guess when you are young and stupid you are young and stupid. And I’m guilty of both of those,” Rodriguez said Tuesday, issuing a mea culpa to the nation from the spring training headquarters of the New York Yankees.
Nothing in the long history of baseball, from the Black Sox scandal to greed that canceled a World Series, has ever threatened to reduce the game to a laughable fraud the way steroids have.
“I think these ballplayers that used steroids hurt the game. You never want to leave a stain on the game. And that’s what they have to think about: Did they stain the game? There’s a core of players that didn’t respect the game,” said 59-year-old Don Baylor, a former major-league star who played in a more innocent era, when a man could be the most valuable player of the American League by hitting .296 and 36 home runs with natural ability.
But, just maybe, here is where baseball can begin to heal its self-inflicted wounds, starting with A-Rod reaching out to a fellow ballplayer in the grave.
In 2003, Taylor Hooton and Rodriguez played baseball in Texas and looked to performance-enhancing drugs to give them an edge on the field.
PEDs can take you to the top. Or bury you.
Rodriguez took steroids, won the MVP by bashing 47 homers for the Rangers and was paid a salary of $21 million. Hooton dreamed of being the No. 1 starting pitcher for Plano West High School, but he committed suicide because of depression his family believes was induced by a 16-year-old athlete’s experimentation with steroids.
From Barry Bonds to Roger Clemens, fallen heroes of the game’s Steroids Era have done a lot of running and hiding, ducking and denying. But very few players have talked the talk and shouted the message about the dangers of PEDs to adolescents feeling the pressure to make the varsity team or look good in a bathing suit.
While Rodriguez admitted to a three-year habit of taking something stronger than Tic Tacs, his apology contained the usual blah, blah, blah about the pressures of being rich and the belief he wasn’t really doing anything wrong. Among the crowd gathered in Florida to hear A-Rod’s address to the baseball world was Don Hooton, a father who established the Taylor Hooton Foundation five years ago, hoping to prevent other families from the grief of a steroids death.
A grown man willing to bend the rules of a child’s game is a cheater who should know way better. But a professional baseball player idolized by a poster tacked to a child’s bedroom wall can tacitly endorse steroids abuse and pollute the minds of a generation that deserves far better.
“This problem hurts a lot of young kids who ask themselves if they should stay in the gym to get better, the way Pete Maravich worked his butt off in basketball, or if it’s just easier to cheat to get ahead,” said Baylor, currently employed as hitting coach for the Rockies. “If there are no consequences for cheating, then young athletes are going to do it.”
If you believe in redemption, however, here’s hoping Rodriguez really meant it when he said: “I’m sorry to the parents. I feel like this happened for a much bigger reason than baseball. And I think God has put me in a position, a forum, where I can be heard . . . I hope kids would not make the same mistake I made.”
A-Rod can be a big gun in the war on PEDs.
“Alex Rodriguez has a chance to step up to the plate. What he can do is provide a voice from the other side to let kids know doing steroids is a bad decision,” said Steve Smith, vice president of the Taylor Hooton Foundation.
With trust shattered by cheaters, anyone who truly loves baseball has a broken heart.
Baseball has no choice except to trust Rodriguez to pick up the pieces and fix it.
Mark Kiszla: 303-954-1053 or mkiszla@denverpost.com
