Tainted Numbers
Written by Bamababe2k9, Friday May 08 2009
So, Manny Ramirez is the latest baseball player caught with his hand in the cookie jar. What’s interesting to me is how devastated some of the writers and reporters seem to be acting when they found out Manny was a cheater too.
Bill Plaschkeof the L.A. Times thinks that the Dodgers should get rid of him; Jason Stark of ESPN has called him a scoundrel. It is as if the world has come to an end. Manny is just the latest player being caught up in a situation that begins and ends with Major League Baseball and they have no one but themselves to blame.
Baseball unlike any other sport out there is a numbers game. Who has the most homeruns? Who has the most strikeouts? Who has 300 wins? When baseball purest talk about the game, they talk about individual numbers rather then team achievements.
When you talk about Babe Ruth, you don’t talk about the number of championships he helped win when he was with the New York Yankees, they talk about him being the first Homerun King. When they talk about Barry Bonds, they don’t talk about the fact that as good as he was, he has never led any team he was on to a World Series Championship, we talk about the homerun records he broke.
No wonder these players feel the need to cheat; they have to live up to so much. Most baseball fans will not remember that Nolan Ryan never won a Cy Young Award, but they will remember him having the most no-hitters.
Roger Clemens hero growing up in Texas was Ryan and he wanted to be just like him. So, in ordered to be remembered he felt the need to cheat to live up to the admiration and the numbers that his hero put up. And for awhile he was. Clemens was considered the best pitcher in baseball, but then it was found out that his numbers were tainted by steroids.
I always thought that baseball hung its hat too much on numbers. Baseball players aren’t measured by the number of championships won, but by the records they break. Peyton Manning numbers wise is probably the best quarterback of this generation. He was the first to break Dan Marino’s single season touchdown passes record and has won the Most Valuable Player award three times already.
Despite all he has done, Manning is still considered by some as the second best player in the league behind Tom Brady. Why? Because Brady has won more championships then Manning. A lot of NFL fans, players and sports reporters are more impressed with championships won, then touchdown passes thrown or MVP awards given.
I’m not saying the NFL has been the frontrunner on the issue of steroids because they haven’t, but the NFL seemly has gone untouched on the subject because they have a stricter drug policy then MLB and the players who have been caught are not the faces of the league.
Baseball has set itself up for failure by first ignoring the steroid problem and most importantly by being too caught up in the numbers game. MLB can’t go back and rewrite the record books because they don’t know when the steroid era began and which players took them and for how long. They have no choice but to live with their mistakes. Maybe if baseball purest focused less on individual achievements, more players would not feel the need to cheat in the future.
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