Everybody and their mothers has had something to say about McGwire’s steroid “apology,” so why not Carlton Fisk?
“That’s a crock,” Fisk said. “There’s a reason they call it performance-enhancing drugs. That’s what it does — performance enhancement. You can be good, but it’s going to make you better. You can be average, but it is going to make you good. If you are below average, it is going to make you average. Some guys who went that route got their five-year, $35 million contracts and now are off into the sunset somewhere. Because once they can’t use (steroids) anymore, they can’t play anymore.
“And steroids, during that time, probably did as much to escalate players’ salaries as did free agency, as did arbitration, and all of that stuff. It did more than just put home runs up on the board or money in the guys’ pocket.”
It’s expected that some of the older players are going to want to call bullshit on McGwire and the rest of the steroid users, but since when did Carlton Fisk become an economist? And don’t you think he’s simplifying things just a little bit?
Anyhow, elsewhere in the article, Fisk arbitrarily subtracts 15-20 home runs per year away from the steroid users, which he seems to think is fair and accurate. And that’s kind of what annoys me about this whole fiasco – Fisk isn’t a doctor, nor are the thousands of self-righteous sports journalists who claim to know what the impact of steroids are. Nobody knows just how much better they make a player, and steroids are going to affect different players in different ways. So a uniform curbing of steroid-inflated numbers doesn’t do anything.
By the way, put them all in the Hall of Fame. Bonds, McGwire, Clemens, etc. All of ‘em.
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