The U.S. Track and Field team hired a former PED user as a coach. His name is Dennis Mitchell and he was part of the BALCO scandal. He was banned, reinstated and now he’s back.

New York Times columnist Juliet Macur is NOT happy about this. And I mean seriously not happy. Her unhappiness is cast in the sort of pearl-clutching, fainting couch moralizing and scandalizing that even the most anti-PED baseball writers have more or less given up because they realized it was basically self-parody. And while her story is about track and field, her unhappiness with this extends to baseball too:

Other sports also have some explaining to do, too, especially after assuming the public has forgotten — or simply doesn’t care — about the drug use that has wrecked the purity of their games.

Look in the dugout at Los Angeles Dodgers games, and you might see the hitting coach Mark McGwire, a slugger who once used steroids to perform his great feats. Stop by the San Francisco Giants’ spring training camp for a glimpse of Barry Bonds, the player convicted of obstructing a grand jury in a case centered on doping, who still will not admit that he doped to succeed. Or take a visit to the Chicago Cubs’ Class AAA Iowa affiliate, where Manny Ramirez, twice suspended for drug use, has just been hired as a player/coach.

I know some New York Times people read HardballTalk occasionally. If any of them could slip by Ms. Macur’s desk and explain that baseball’s purity was gone a long, long time before Mark McGwire got hired to be a hitting coach, I’d appreciate it.

Oh, and slip her the All-Star voting results too — the ones which currently have Ryan Braun starting in the outfield — to show her that to the extent baseball assumes fans don’t care, well, they’re absolutely right.