Hypothetically Speaking

Far-be-it from me to pass judgment on anyone’s individual life choices. Who am I to say if, given the chance, I wouldn’t have taken steroids in Little League to improve my fastball? Maybe I would have finally struck out Jimmy Waddington, and who knows, my whole life could be different.

And if I chanced my way into the majors, but started to lose the movement on my curveball, I might find myself sneezing into my glove from time to time, finding ways to junk up the ball.

But the umpires these days, they’ve got sharp eyes. So maybe I get caught throwing illegal pitches. Now my fastball’s no good, and my curveball doesn’t curve, and I’m barley making the Major League minimum. So I call up my friends in the “labor union” and tell them I’m going to intentionally bomb my next start in exchange for a few dollars.

Ah, Bud Selig knew I was a shady character and was monitoring my phone calls. Now I’m off the team, banned from baseball and I’ve got a mafia problem to deal with.

Thankfully my life didn’t go down that road, and I’m in the luxurious position of watching other people make mistakes.

The point is, we don’t know what leads people to make the decisions they do. We wanted Roger Clemens to be an uber-human, so he became one and we got mad at him. We have no idea about any aspect of Pete Rose’s life that didn’t occur on the diamond except that he liked to gamble, so we damn him to hell (meanwhile Dwight Gooden could have been one of the best pitchers ever, but had a bit too much of “the white stuff,” so now he’s just a tragic figure who achieved redemption).

Athletes are human beings who make decisions, and fans and the media have gone a little off the deep end in recent years, condemning everything they say or do. The athletes deserve a chance to explain themselves, but when they do, they best be frank.

If hypothetical pitcher me was caught juicing, cheating, betting and tanking, I would not call a press conference to say I thought these accusations are appalling. I would say, look you got me. I wasn’t that good. I tried to be. My bad.

And then it would be over, I’d go on with my life, you’d go on with yours and this would be readdressed only in future games of Trivial Pursuit and when I died. Somehow Athletes fail to realize that part of the equation.

Take, for example, the three Olympic relay runners who wish to retain their medals even though their teammate Marion Jones is serving a prison sentence for lying to a grand jury about whether or not she was running a small chemistry set in her bloodstream during the 2000 games.

Her teammates say they didn’t know, and honestly, I’m in a bit of disbelief at their disbelief. At the time Jones was breaking records while becoming a media darling. They shared a training space, a locker room and numerous flights – to say nothing of their personal lives – with each other.

But they didn’t notice their teammate’s steady transformation into a mutant.

And you know what, even if their claims of ignorance are true, they don’t deserve the medals anyway. On that relay team, Jones was John, Paul and George, while the other three were all Ringo.