Forget Bonds, McGwire and Sosa.If there's one good thing to come out of this whole steroid mess it's the fact that the kid from Seattle returns to his rightful prominence in the recordbooks because he's the only major slugger from the 1990s that wasn't juiced up.
I mean lets look at the evidence:
- Have you seen Griffey? The man makes Kate Moss look chunky.
- The injuries, one thing that I think is really overlooked in the whole steroids scandal is the fact that the drugs help you recover after lifting or heal faster. They don't necessarily make you stronger, but the increased amount of lifting that you can do does.
You can avoid injuries by taking steroids and other performance enhancing drugs. However, if there's a baseball player that's suffered through more injuries than Griffy, god save their soul.
Now as he approaches the 600 homer milestone, you can't help but be in awe of the guy. I don't know why the media isn't making a bigger deal about it compared to the way they praised our other tainted sports heroes.
Deadspin has a nice post on it:
After all, considering the considerable steroid haze surrounding Bonds and (to a somewhat lesser extent) Sosa, one could make the argument that Griffey is the first "legitimate" player to reach the mark since Mays. And when you consider how much time Griffey has missed because of injury — injuries that, theoretically, could have been avoided a bit if he had bothered to use steroids — he probably should have reached this mark years ago.
I'm just about to bust out those Griffey Mariner t-shirts everyone had in the 90s.
I say we start giving Brett Boone for credit, too. There's a guy who didn't take steroids. Nope. He was decent starting out, became so-so, and then all of a sudden had three BREATH TAKING years, and then all of a sudden, sucked tremendously.
ReplyDeleteGasp! Wait a second!
P.S.
ReplyDeleteDid you know, in some circles, praying is considered cheating? And I'm not even talking about praying for help. I'm talking about praying in that it helps sooth athletes before competition. Some people think that that, as a stress reliever, helps athletes play better.
Simply breath taking, huh?