To be clear, I’m not advocating steroid abuse. What I AM taking issue with is the hypocritical attack on what I believe to be one of the greatest athletes ever. Was he only great because of the steroids? No. And everyone knows that. But everyone is also unduly thrilled to have this irrefutable confession on their side in their gleeful rejections of his talent.
A-Rod didn’t need drugs, but he did them anyway. Did Bill Belichick need to tape the Jets to beat them? No, but he did anyway. He lied about it, then got caught. And even though we all know sideline taping is going on in every NFL team, the Patriots were the ones branded with the scarlet C.
Was New England only good because they cheated? Of course not. But all the public needed was one cold, hard sin. Just one. And then we can ignore the nagging thought in our heads that maybe we hate the Pats because they’re good.
Spygate handed us our ace–it’s not that we’re bitter haters! It’s that they’re low-life cheaters! And as an added bonus, Spygate could be leveraged into a bigger shadow of doubt. Did the Pats ever really have a dynasty? Now we’ll never know, so throw some asterisks on those years, too.
It used to be that society sated its need for moral superiority by actively championing the underdog. But maybe that ideal has been replaced by demonizing juggernauts. It’s not enough for them to be taken down, they need to be stripped of their dignity and spirit.
We’ve come to embrace this belief that perfection is terrifying and that the sooner we can capitalize on its armor’s chinks, the better. But this mentality is derived from an empty tautology–the idea that if the greatest fall, then we somehow have something to gain.
The fact is, the failures and successes of someone else have absolutely zero effect on our own.
Which is why I don’t think A-Rod should be kept out of the Hall of Fame.
The opposition argues that A-Rod doesn’t deserve the honor of being celebrated alongside the likes of Ted Williams and Joe DiMaggio. But baseball is a game of numbers, and it’s not graded on a curve. If A-Rod juiced every day from the second he hit puberty, if he hit 95 HRs in one season, and batted .469…does that have some kind of deflating effect on Ty Cobb’s BA?
The numbers punctuate the sport’s rich history. We can’t begin tempering these statistics with our own loose equations built on cultural impact. I think it was best said in Derek Zumsteg’s “The Cheater’s Guide to Baseball”:
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