Focus on baseball, not Barry Bonds
Last week, a secretly recorded tape of a phone conversation surfaced in which Barry Bonds' trainer, Greg Anderson, confessed to providing Bonds with an undetectable performance-enhancing steroid during the 2003 season.
Whether the tape is authentic has yet to be determined. What is certain is that this could not have come at a worse time for baseball.
Commissioner Bud Selig said it best Saturday night at theYankees-Red Sox game when he said, "Here we are in Game 3 of the Red Sox-Yankees, which people have waited for all year, and what are we sitting around talking about? This is not good for the sport. This is not good for any of the parties involved, and, of course, I include the fans."
How right he is.
Here it is, mid-October, the playoffs are going on, the four best teams in baseball are fighting it out in order to get to the World Series, and people are more concerned about whether Barry Bonds has been taking steroids during the past few seasons than about what is going on in the ALCS or the NLCS.
It is not fair to the players still playing, who have to play the entire season in Bonds' shadow while everyone watches as he attempts to break a record that will inevitably be called into question later.
Plus, Bonds' season is over and it is time for players like Albert Pujols and Derek Jeter to step into the spotlight, but Bonds is still able to grab it away from them.
It's also not fair to the fans.
Never mind Clemens' masterful pitching performance, which could possibly be his last performance ever.
Never mind David Ortiz's walk-off homer or bloop single to save the Bo Sox's season Sunday and Monday.
I'd even rather hear about the riot police at Yankee Stadium Tuesday night.
The media chose to cover the steroid controversy instead.
Fans are getting cheated out of two very entertaining series.
The release of the tapes followed two other major steroid incidents surfaced last week.
Former National League MVP Ken Caminiti, who admitted to using steroids during his MVP year of 1996, died after suffering a heart attack in New York City.
The next day, Yankee outfielder Gary Sheffield admitted in the Oct. 11 issue of Sports Illustrated to unknowingly using a steroid cream that he believed would make his surgically repaired knee feel better. Who gave Sheffield the cream?
None other than Bonds himself.
All of these situations do not paint a pretty picture for baseball. It seems as though it is one big argument over who is telling the truth. But no matter who is telling the truth, steroids are a big problem in baseball.
Big enough to even overshadow the playoffs, the most exciting time of the year.