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June 12, 2006

Prospectus Today

Witch Hunt

by Joe Sheehan

I don’t particularly want to write today’s column. Unlike seemingly every other sportswriter in America, I don’t enjoy the steroids-in-baseball story. I’d rather focus on the game on the field, the plays and players that drew me to the game and to this space. However, I also don’t feel comfortable standing silent while the story is reduced to a simple, easily-digested storyline. This is a complex, difficult issue, with much more gray between the black and the white than is being acknowledged in the mainstream. As a writer who, like all of the breed, is cursed with a healthy ego, it does me little good to write pieces that will bring me scorn from many readers and set me far, far apart from the center of the discussion.

I’ve struggled to craft the many points I want to make about this matter into an article that flows; another reason I don’t enjoy writing about it. There are many, many parts of this that are just wrong, but they’re not wrong in any way that’s connected. So I’ll ask your indulgence as I use the bullet-point format to make a series of points about the current controversies, ones that I believe have to be catalogued if we’re to get a complete picture of their scope. This side--the “Hey, wait a minute” side--has to at least find its way into the discussion.

• No one cares about Jason Grimsley. Grimsley is just another guy, like Juan Rincon or Matt Lawton or Ryan Franklin. The public and the media doesn’t really care what he did to get along. The fact that he’s been nabbed with human growth hormone (HGH) is a new twist, of course, but that’s just a detail. No one cares that Jason Grimsley might have given himself an edge on Kevin Jarvis or Rick Huisman or Chad Paronto in job battles over the years.

  What people care about is Grimsley’s apparent willingness to give up names to federal investigators. What has people excited is the presence of documents that are apparently larded with Grimsley’s speculations on which of his many teammates over the years used drugs. We’ve seen the redacted documents, and the parlor-room speculation as to which names have been covered is one of the more embarrassing moments in the ongoing investigations.

  The rush past the guilty party to guess at the names of more famous guilty parties confirms what I’ve argued since the beginning: this is about stars. The truth, what we’ve learned from two-plus years of steroid suspensions, is that the people using performance-enhancing drugs aren’t doing so to break cherished records, and they’re certainly not, in toto, responsible for any league-wide offensive trends. That’s not sexy, but it’s truth. So when a Jason Grimsley is caught, well, that’s not going to sell papers, but the spaces between the tops of letters…man, that could be a Hall of Famer!

  This story isn’t about baseball or cheating or drugs. It’s about the media’s and the public’s lust for blood.

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