UPDATE: I missed this, but apparently Pearlman wrote this up a couple of days ago.
Jeff Pearlman went on Brian Kenny’s radio show this morning and he took the retro-PED-discipline craze to new heights. He’s not just content to give Alex Rodriguez discipline mulitple-times greater than the sanctions currently in place call for, but he wants to go back and penalize Mark McGwire for taking PEDs 15 years ago when he broke Roger Maris’ home run record. The form of the discipline: fire him from his current job as Dodgers’ hitting coach and ban him from baseball.
Keep in mind, of course, that McGwire retired two years before there even was drug testing in baseball.
So why the ban? Because he “did some amazing damage ... to the record book.” He broke a “sacred, sacred” record. And he was kind of a jerk to the media. Really. “He was not exactly the most gracious guy that summer ... he was a pain to deal with.” That’s the argument.
Kenny didn’t go there, but I’m curious if he would ban all players ever associated with PEDs from the game or just the ones who broke records and weren’t nice to reporters. Whether this is about the ethics of cheating or merely the ethics of cheating in such a way as to make reporters feel foolish after the fact.
Give a listen:
