Bagwell’s numbers look worthy of Cooperstown, but he has been tied to steroid speculation enough that he “defended” himself in an ESPN.com interview last month. His defense? “I have no problem” with a guy juicing up, he said. To take such a position today is wildly irresponsible. It also invites the very talk that Bagwell claimed to be “sick and tired of.”
Bagwell was an admitted Andro user who hired a competitive bodybuilder to make him as big as he could be, who claimed, McGwire-like, that Andro “doesn’t help you hit home runs,” who went from a prospect with “no pop” to massively changing his body and outhomering all but six big leaguers in the 13 seasons before steroid penalties (Ken Griffey Jr. and five connected to steroids: Bonds, Sosa, Rafael Palmeiro, Mark McGwire and Juan Gonzalez), and who condones the use of steroids -- but said, “I never used.”
Wow. Forget evidence or even eyeball-speculation. Now it’s enough to be merely “tied to speculation,” -- query; who’s doing the tying? -- to have defended oneself and to have engaged in “irresponsible” talk. That gets you branded a cheater by some writers now. That’s enough on which to base character assassination.
Do these people have any idea how horrifying they sound? I understand when the Jeff Pearlmans of the world go off the rails because that’s just what they do. But Verducci? He’s a smart and able writer, but when it comes to this stuff he sounds like Roy Cohn when he worked for the Senate Permanent Subcommittee.
What has come over baseball writers?