The Major League Baseball (MLB) “steroid era,” one of the darkest times in North American sports history, is nearing its long-awaited and long-overdue end. With the suspensions of players Nelson Cruz and Ryan Braun, baseball’s performance-enhancing drug users have been given a fair warning to quit while they’re ahead. However, baseball’s past has received a different treatment.
The face of the steroid era has always been Alex “A-Rod” Rodriguez. With just about every other violator receiving 50 games, Commissioner Bud Selig handed Rodriguez a whopping 211 game suspension that would keep him out of baseball until the 2015 season when he will be nearing his 40th birthday.
Rodriguez appealed this decision; however his efforts will most likely be for nothing. The suspension comes just five years after Rodriguez signed a 10-year contract with New York worth over 200 million dollars. Just two seasons later, he admitted to using steroids during the 2003 season. In retrospect, it looks as though the Yankees made a grave mistake.
It may seem that I am singling out Rodriguez, but I am merely taking the same route as MLB in handling the situation. The Commissioner of Baseball used A-Rod as the poster boy for this scandal, so I’m doing the same thing.
The suspension goes far beyond a simply punishing a man for “juicing;” it also condemns his efforts to cover up his crimes and privately endorse Tony Boesch and his Bio-Genesis clinic. His lack of loyalty towards the media, the Yankees, the league, the fans, and the sport of baseball is disappointing.
Baseball fans felt that Rodriguez had been using steroids for a long time, and when he announced in 2010 that he used them in 2003, I don’t think it came as a shock to any of us. That being said, Rodriguez was quite possibly the last outlaw left from the steroid era.
The nightmare Rodriguez is being put through is without a doubt a message: one that was difficult to send to Barry Bonds, Mark McGwire, and Roger Clemens. Their playing days were already over when they were implicated in scandals, and MLB did not know how to handle these after-the-fact discoveries of wrongdoing. Now, having dealt with performance-enhancing drugs before, MLB no longer hesitates to take action.
The “steroid era” threatened baseball’s integrity, rendering America’s pastime a poor representative of our nation. The process to restore pride in that pastime has begun, and we can once again sit back and enjoy a Sox game on a summer night.
Though it may finally be nearing the end, the steroid era forever changed baseball for the worse. We now consider the possibility of juicing for every player who hits 30 or more homers. I remember looking up to Manny Ramirez like he was a god, but today I wonder what I was thinking.
Despite all that, steroids will never taint something as pure as a young boy’s love for his hometown team. For me, the ignorance was bliss. If watching baseball still sends us back to our child-like passion for the game, then steroids did not win.
I dream of nothing more than to see baseball in 10 or 20 years treat this issue like a bad memory. I think a lot of people share that dream with me: for baseball to have the honor and pageantry it once had. We have a long road ahead, but MLB may finally be heading down the right path.