Who Hasn’t Done a Little HGH?
They’re all coming out of the woodwork now. Fernando Vina, F.P. Santangelo, Brian Roberts, and, of course, Andy Pettitte. They owned up to doing HGH, but just once or twice. And always in an attempt to get healthy and—wait for it— because they wanted to “help the ballclub.”
Not Roger Clemens. Not yet, anyway. “I’m not talking to y’all about it,” Clemens told reporters who had camped out in Houston. Clemens apparently won’t be talking to Texas high school kids either. Clemens was supposed to give a speech about his career and how he managed to play so long. Apparently, saying his prayers and eating his vitamins didn’t fully do the trick.
The noose is tightening on all of them now. Suddenly, Roberts doesn’t seem so innocent after he admitted to using steroids (just once, of course). You think he might have told the franchise that is paying him $14 million before they came to his defense over the weekend, but baseball has lived in this fantasy world for so long that they (players, management, and observers) still think the public will accept their ridiculous and empty explanations.
On a day when the New York Times laid out the details of the deal between federal investigators, Mitchell, and Clemens’ former trainer, Brian McNamee, the paper’s own baseball columnist says the Mitchell Report didn’t show a whole lot of effort. Right.
There is hope, however. Rookie of the Year Dustin Pedroia had some strong words for the past generation of players in a story in the Providence Journal. Pedroia called the young players the “clean generation,” and said this is the only way baseball can get itself out of this mess.
We all know the steroid takers are a step ahead of the steroid testers. We all know management does not care if players are taking performance enhancing drugs. The only way baseball can get itself right is if the players decide that they want the game to be clean.
Beyond that, all the empty platitudes about wanting to help the team don’t amount to anything other than cheap rhetoric.
