Are the teams in on this?
The use of steroids and other banned performance enhancing drugs (PEDs) has given the game of baseball a black eye from which it will take years to recover. Jose Canseco, Mark McGwire, Raphael Palmeiro, Miguel Tejada, Alex Rodriguez, Roger Clemens, Barry Bonds, Jason Giambi and Manny Ramirez are only the biggest names to admit or be caught using; the list of players goes on. However, as more players are outed in this drug scandal, something even darker becomes clear: that entire organizations may have been complicit in the use of the substances.
That’s what former Boston Red Sox utility man Lou Merloni is hinting at in his recent allegations. He alleges that the team hired a doctor to come speak to the team about how to use steroids. It’s all well and good for a team to say they follow the rules of Major League Baseball and do not support the use of PEDs, but the benefits to them are obvious – increased offensive production, more runs and more fans paying to sit in the seats. They could easily toe the company line, then do the dirty behind closed doors. That’s what organizations like ACORN and Self-Help Inc. did to the American home mortgage scene; and they dare to criticize open consumer products like cash advance and installment loans?
An important meeting
Doug Miller reports for MLB.com that Lou Merloni has said that he “remembered a Spring Training meeting in which a doctor explained to players how to use steroids intelligently and without abuse.” According to the Boston Globe, Merloni’s exact words were:
I’m in Spring Training, and I got an 8:30-9:00 meeting in the morning. I walk into that office, and this happened while I was with the Boston Red Sox before this last regime, I’m sitting in the meeting. There’s a doctor up there and he’s talking about steroids, and everyone was like, ‘Here we go, we’re going to sit here and get the whole thing — they’re bad for you.’
No. He spins it and says, ‘You know what? If you take steroids and sit on the couch all winter long, you can actually get stronger than someone who works out clean. If you’re going to take steroids, one cycle won’t hurt you; abusing steroids will.’
“Like teaching your teenage daughter about sex education”
Lou Merloni supposedly made a clarification in his statements to the Globe, claiming that neither the doctor or Red Sox personnel encouraged steroid use. He also said that the team was likely aware that some players on the team were using. However, spare me the backpedaling, Lou. If this indeed went on, and the doctor was hired by the team, then the Boston Red Sox were advocating steroid use. “I don’t support steroid use, but if you wanna do it, check this out. Here’s how…” Please don’t insult the fans’ intelligence.
“It was like teaching your teenage daughter about sex education,” Merloni told the newspaper. “The organization acknowledged that there were likely players using steroids, and basically, ‘If you’re going to use them, this is how you use them so you don’t abuse them.’”
Another reason for Boston to hate Dan Duquette?
Merloni said he could neither remember the doctor’s name or when the talk occurred. Boston general manager during Merloni’s tenure with the team – Dan Duquette – responded angrily to the Globe:
It’s ridiculous — it’s totally unfounded. Who was the doctor? Tell me who the doctor is. If there was such a doctor, he wasn’t in the employ of the Red Sox. We brought in doctors to educate the players on the Major League drug policy at the time at the recommendation of Major League Baseball. This is so ridiculous, I hate to even respond to it.
Lou Merloni played for the Boston Red Sox from 1998-2002. In 423 total Major League games, the jack-of-all-trades batted .271 with 14 home runs, a total that is not likely to have been steroid or PED-enhanced. Whether cash advance and installment loans factor into his post-playing budget is unknown to this writer.
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It sounds a bit strange that a professional MLB team would actually hire a doctor to educate players on how to use steroids “safely.” Personally, I don’t believe a thing Merloni is claiming. I mean, would they really be that stupid? Then again, stupid things happen every day.
At this point, it doesn’t seem that shocking. Granted, I would have preferred the whistle being blown on the Yankees, but that’s splitting hairs. At this point, it’s more like which players HAVEN’T taken steroids. When you think about – it isn’t surprising. The emphasis is to hit more home runs, win more games and World Series, because that means more money, new stadiums, etc. Not to put a good or bad value on the thing, but it’s the bottom line. As easy as it is to line up and declare all of these people as immoral, this, that, or the other, the fact is that they felt compelled to do it for a reason. Not to give weight to the Nuremburg defense or anything, but there had to have been compelling factors.