You apparently get one day to savor your retirement before someone accuses you of taking steroids. Yahoo!’s Steve Henson, everyone:
Eight years with the Red Sox made Garciaparra a master at deflecting
tough questions in a genial manner. Performance-enhancing drugs weren’t
a topic he’d discuss, and if steroids had helped him bulk up in Boston
and break down periodically thereafter, he’d take that secret to the
Manhattan Beach, Calif., home he shares with wife Mia Hamm and their
young twin daughters.Garciaparra’s name didn’t come up in the Mitchell Report. He never
testified before Congress. He wasn’t implicated in BALCO. Yet numerous
people in baseball, from executives to reporters to other players, talk
about his career as if performance-enhancing drug use was a given . . . It is the hulking figure on the SI cover, though, that everyone remembers. And in hindsight, with what we know about the era and Mark McGwire and Barry Bonds(notes) and A-Rod and Manny Ramirez(notes) … well, make sure to take a look at that cover.
Henson goes on to say “He is retiring for one reason – an ailing body. Only he knows all the reasons it got that way.”
For the second time today I have to say that I don’t know if a player ever took PEDs, but I know the writer making the accusation doesn’t know either, yet does it anyway. And though I’m certain the answer will be “never,” I ask again: when will anyone in the mainstream media call out guys like Steve Henson (or Rick Telander or Jon Heyman) for hurling such accusations the way they called out blogger Jerrod Morris for doing something far, far less irresponsible?
And no, “because we think Nomar did it and Ibanez didn’t” is not an acceptable answer. At least not for people who like to lecture others about “journalistic integrity” all the time.
