We Are All on Drugs

Or at least more and more of us are each day, at this rate, thanks to leaked news by lawyers (God I hate them) that Manny and Big Papi were on the infamous 2003 "list" that also nailed A-Rod earlier this season.

Anyone out there still care?

Conventional wisdom/gallows humor has it at this point that the only two "stars" that we can say were "definitively" clean from 1995 onwards were Ken Griffey, Jr. (who, given the sheer number of injuries, we can say at worst took some terrible steroids that did nothing for his regenerative abilities) and Derek Jeter. But we wouldn't be surprised if they were doping, either, would we?

Maybe David Wells, since booze and burgers seemed to give him otherworldly abilities (Re: perfect game). But any other storyline between then and now - Maddux and the Big Unit's longevity, Schilling's bloody sock, single-season monster years from Bret Boone, Adrian Beltre, Luis Gonzalez, Mark Teixiera's power, Carl Crawford's speed, Hanley Ramirez's versatility, etc etc - they've got as much pull with us as the Rome swimming records, don't they?

I'd like to believe that the recent sorta-"crackdown" has produced some clean stars - Lincecum and Greinke in particular come to mind (although Greinke was on steroids for the mind to clear some of those cobwebs up), but again, I wouldn't be surprised if "Tiny Tim"'s ability to fire away at 98 mph for 9 innings has a little chemical oomph behind it.

Of course, the elephant in the room, the big guy who's managed to duck this entire era and who's allowed (up to now) every baseball fan/purist to hold a little spark of innocence and faith in baseball as we know it, is the Phat One. Check out this ridiculousness. Let's do a quick comparison:

Player A: .314BA, .394 OBP, .561 SLG, 99 runs, 32 HR, 103 RBI, 93 strikeouts
Player B: .251BA, .339 OBP, .543 SLG, 105 runs, 48 HR, 146 RBI, 199 strikeouts

Suppose these two went up for MVP this year. A has a huge advantage in BA, OBP, and strikeouts. B has a huge advantage in HR and RBI. They're roughly equal in slugging and runs. It would not be inconceivable to hand it to either player, although I would suggest that B has an edge by virtue of his advantage in the "sexy numbers". But it would be close, I feel.

Player B is, of course, Ryan Howard (although I guess you could have guessed Adam Dunn, but do you really think I would use Adam Dunn as a comparative point?), and this particular stat line was his 2008 MVP runner-up season to Pujols. So Howard was, by one particular measure, the second-best player in the National League in 2008.

Player A doesn't exist.

I went through Pujols' 8 year career and picked out his worst statistic in every category. This is the worst Pujols has ever been at anything for an entire season (and his Ks is actually an outlier, because he's never struck out more than 69 times a season other than his rookie season). I think the fact that Pujols' worst career stats combined could compete for MVP in any given year is a testament to how ridiculous he has been since he broke into the league in 2001. Throughout it all, he has dodged the 3 major steroid-labeling events of our time: Jose Canseco, the Mitchell Report, and now the 2003 "list." If there's one person we wanted to bet the house on being free of steroids, it would be this guy.

I want to believe. I want to hold a spark of joy alive in all of this cynicism surrounding baseball. And I hope, for the sake of baseball, Pujols never did steroids - maybe then his legacy, on top of everyone of his baseball accomplishments, would read, "He did it clean."