A big, dopey mess
For your Sunday morning reading pleasure, we present the actual Los Angeles Times story this morning naming Miguel Tejada, Brian Roberts and Jay Gibbons, among others, as the redacted names in the Jason Grimsley affidavit.
My suggestion for everybody: there needs to be some kind of one-week retreat for every sports fan in America - a week off simply to pause and reflect - so that we can once and for all get our heads wrapped around exactly what's going on with performance-enhancing drugs in all sports. Baseball, football, cycling, track, even the sports we haven't put in that pile yet for whatever reason. We're still having knee-jerk reactions to everything that happens and about every revelation - who we believe, who we don't, who we support, who we vilify, how this all fits in within the context of sports and society overall.
Here's why: more names keep coming out, and what we were absolutely sure we knew about doping, its practitioners and its effects keeps getting thrown mockingly in our faces. There's no doubt that at this very second, people are saying, NO, not Miggy, not B-Rob, they don't seem like the type. Or, more widely, NO, not the Rocket. Yet it was easy for everybody to say, Hell yeah, Bonds is using.
We need to re-calibrate our definition of cheating, balance the fact that actual failed drug tests are rare with the fact that the drugs are made specifically to beat such tests, and recognize that denial is always the first reaction to a report like this.
It will probably take more than a week to sort all of that out. But anything is better than the pointless, stupid blurting out of commentary on these revelations. It's getting us nowhere. Obviously, with new names coming out every day, how far along are we in the discourse about this? Can everybody at least agree now that Barry Bonds isn't the Typhoid Mary of sports doping?
Anyway, Ravens kickoff in two hours. So forget all this stuff for now. Right?

Comments
Chalk up another W for the only PRO team left in Baltimore.
Posted by: Tim | October 1, 2006 4:47 PM
I read the LA Times story last night when it was posted. This is news, it should be reported. I'm glad this came out at seasons-end. I was at the Yard last year the day the Raffy revelation story broke and while the O's had begun to fade, that killed 'em dead.
I always thought that Jose Canseco was the Typhoid Mary of baseball doping.
I'm surprised no one else posted on this subject.
Posted by: hysdavid | October 1, 2006 9:13 PM