When the Nationals are out of town and I’m not working a MASN broadcast, I go to a lot of Baltimore Orioles’ games. This is no confession; if you know me at all, you know I’m prone to going to a lot of baseball games. It’s what I do.
Last week I went to an Orioles-Mets interleague matchup, and on the field before the game I spoke with Hall of Famer Jim Palmer.
I have tremendous respect for Palmer. Not just for what he accomplished as a player, but I’ve learned a lot about the game from his work as an analyst, and from numerous one-on-one conversations.
I know a lot of male fans don’t care for Jim. I hear it all the time from talk show callers, and I really think it’s spurred by the fact that Jim looks better in his 60’s than any of us looked in our 20’s. Too bad, because he’s an absolute font of baseball wisdom.
All that being said, I asked last week if, during his career as a player, if he would’ve known if any of his Baltimore teammates were using performance-enhancing drugs.
“Probably,” he replied. Then, pausing briefly, he said, “but maybe not.”
A rare moment of indecision by the man they call “Cakes.”
“I think if I’d noticed a between-seasons weight gain that all seemed to be muscle, I would’ve wondered how he did it,” he said, “but I doubt my first reaction would’ve been to think ‘Hmmm, steroids.'”
Palmer’s last season as an active player was 1984, and the arrival of the blown-up sluggers like Jose Canseco and Mark McGwire was still a year or two away. Steroids were certainly out there and available before then, and steroid allegations had been made against some players as early as a decade prior, but Palmer — who never really sugar-coats anything in talking about the game — still doubts his, or anyone’s initial reaction would have been to think anything ugly was going on.
Which brings us to the media.
I’ve covered baseball since the mid-70s. I’ve been in countless clubhouses. So have lots and lots of other reporters. That we didn’t uncover the use of performance-enhancing drugs during all of those years seems to make us accomplices, somehow, in the eyes of many fans. When Brady Anderson went from hitting 15-20 home runs per year to bashing 50 of them in 1996, that we didn’t all come to that “Eureka!” moment simultaneously has labeled us all either dopes, or complicit in the conspiracy.
Ridiculous.
Beyond reading the instructions on a prescription bottle, my medical training is pretty much nonexistent. I’m sure the same holds true for most of my colleagues. Had media outlets hired scribes or broadcasters trained in sports medicine, the fans might have a point.
The reality of the entire sorry episode is that they’d rather take the easy road: Blame the messenger.
Phil Wood is a contributor to Nats Xtra on MASN. Contact him at [email protected].
