Why Jayson Stark Is Wrong About Alex Rodriguez and Steroids

I keep reading those previous seven paragraphs, trying my best to fully comprehend them. I'm not really succeeding.

I'm not either.  But probably for different reasons.
   
How could baseball have allowed this to happen to itself? How? Can anyone recall any other sport that has ever committed such an insane act of self-destruction?

If we apply the same standards for performance enhancing drugs to professional football or basketball as we have to baseball, we'll surely see similar fallouts in the years to come.  Does anyone really believe that offensive lineman pack on hundreds of pounds of muscle through weight training and dieting? 

A better question is: why did we scapegoat Major League Baseball?

And the answer, of course, is that that the sports fans of America care a whole lot more about the sanctity of baseball records than similar feats in other professional sports.

What compares to it? The Black Sox? This is worse. Game-fixing in college basketball? This is worse. Nominate any scandal in the history of sports. My vote is that this is worse.

Why open the nominations to other professional sports when there's such an obvious example in baseball itself? 

Ever heard of the color line policy, Mr. Stark?  That is a scandal of truly epic proportions.

Segregation in baseball lasted for over 50 years; it's existence prevented some of the most talented ballplayers known to man from competing at the professional level and deprived fans of the game from witnessing this talent first hand.  This blatantly unjust policy has also left baseball historians clueless about how Josh Gibson might have performed in the Major Leagues, or whether Babe Ruth would have still hit 714 dingers against black pitching.  

The color line policy made Hall of Fame decisions for black men who played before 1945 quite difficult.  Voters could have easily said that because statistics were not regularly kept in the Negro Leagues that those players should be ineligible for nomination.

They didn't though—and thank the lord for that.  We can now take our children and our children's children to Cooperstown and honor Oscar Charleston just as we do Tris Speaker.

Hall of Fame arguments for those who played during the steroid era are significantly less complex.  We know how Barry Bonds stacked up to other hitters on roids, and we also know how he performed against pitchers who were putting the same crap into their bodies.

Far more importantly, while the prevalence of performance enhancing drugs in baseball may be a true shame, it's hardly as unjust and immoral as excluding entire groups of people from competing based upon the color of their skin.

Memo to Jayson Stark: it is an insult to Jackie Robinson, Branch Rickey, those who played in the Negro Leagues and the entire African-American population of this country for you to suggest that the fallout over performance enhancing drugs is the greatest scandal in the history of sports.

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