This guy is well coached. He is playing to peoples base emotions. Bottom line – no matter how much he cries and sobs he is a cheater who made millions off his cheating and now will make more on talk shows, exclusive interviews and yes just wait the book. Mark, this is a message for you and Tony – The P and the E in PED stands for performance enhancing. That extra fifty pounds of muscle helped you. Yea you could hit, but it is simple physics F = M x A. You must have slept through that class at USC. We should not forgive and we should not forget. Oh buy the way, patronizing commissioner Bud Light will not help you get more Hall of Fame votes. Bud Light and his cronies laughed all the way to the bank during the so-called steroid era. They can all pat themselves on the back about how clean baseball is today – My answer to that is three letters HGH! Where are you Joe DiMaggio?
8 Comments
Mark Shropshire
Vern – I agree completely. I was just talking to some of my athletes about it and all of us figured that the book deal was only a few weeks away. Lets be real here – McGuire did this now so he doesn’t have to face the music during the season. This was orchastrated from the start. And to sit there and tell us that steroid use didn’t have anything to do with his stats? Are you kidding me?? How dumb does he think people are that they will buy that crap? He can get all choked up – I get that. He’s prob. ashamed of what he did, but at the end of the day he’s riding home in a Bently and you and I are driving home in a Toyota Carolla.
Jay Johnson
Thank you.
While I really enjoyed the book Three Nights in August and the window it provided into Tony La Russa’s approach to coaching, I was very disappointed with his comment that McGuire should get a pass because McGuire only used steroids to recovery from injury. As you pointed out, F=MxA and McGuire altered one if not both of those variables.
Thanks for taking a stand Vern. You’ve been in that culture and you’re obviously in a better position than most of your readership to comment and criticize.
E
I wish you guys were better writers and spellers. The sentiment in this post is almost lost to me amid funky spelling and lost/extra words.
T
good looking out. E. T.
chris
it’s the message – not the medium
don’t be so pedantic
F
A interesting aspect of this, from Vickers book Cognition perception and decision making;
The extra muscle, using PED does much more than F=M x a. It gives the batter the possibility to start their swing a bit later, and therefor gives them the opportunity the read the ball a bit longer. This is a huge advantage. So it is cheating big time.
But than again what American pro sport is not these days.
chris
Cheating in American pro sports???? Why label it as American only????
Of course American pro sports are not as free of cheating as the soccer of Europe.
And let’s not forget Russian hockey, or International Track and field, or Olympic weightlifting or Chinese swimming, English Rugby Union . . .
Frank
Vern, I love your blog. I find your prose thoughtful and insightful.
I agree McGuire was a cheater. I disagree Joe Dimaggio is the moral compass we’re shooting for!
Baseball was no “cleaner” back then. The “good old days” weren’t as scutinized as the game is today.