I’m just not buying it. Maybe Palmeiro took steroids early in his career. But why now?

Here’s a guy in the last season of his career. He has a Hall of Fame slot all but locked up. Three thousand hits, five hundred home runs. He also makes considerable money in endorsement deals. Why would he jeopardize his pitch money and his legacy to juice up for the last season of his career? Especially after testifying before Congress that he’s clean? Especially knowing that baseball would be extra vigilant about testing for the stuff this year?

Predictably, sportswriters and talking heads are rifling through their thesauri for superlatives apt enough to express their profound disappointmentin Raffy.

Please.

Sportswriters suffer from an eternal inferiority complex. Their media buddies in the other sections of the newspaper get to cover life and death stuff. So on those rare occasions when a sports story spills over to the front page, all of these hacks get the jones to do some real writing on issues even Congress seems to care about. See John Rocker. Ron Artest. Augusta National.

Hence, the spectacle of the mustard-stained ink rat who dines on donuts, ballpark kielbasas and press box buffets using his column to lecture a guy like Palmeiro about what he puts into his body.

My best guess is that Pameiro’s either a victim of Bayes’ Theorem or that he took a supplement from someone he trusted, but probably shouldn’t have.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 2nd, 2005 at 8:50 am by Radley Balko and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.