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As a lifelong north side fan it’s very rare that I summon up praise for somebody on Chicago’s south side.  But occasionally I have to waive that bias long enough to stand up and applaud someone like White Sox great Carlton Fisk in his recent Chicago Tribune interview where he blasts Mark McGwire and Roger Clemens for steroid use and calling their public excuses “a crock”.  Honesty from anybody associated with baseball these days is an unexpected breath of fresh air.

Carlton Fisk hits this one out of the park

In the article Fisk comes off as bitter about the entire steroid era.  And why shouldn’t he be?  Anybody who played the game clean and lost their career to the inevitable accumulation of injuries has a right to be pissed at some pharmaceutical experiment defying nature to hit 73 dongs at the ripe old age of 39.  These monsters on steroids were signing big money contracts for long terms and stealing money out of the pockets of the clean players.  They never had a chance.

One of the silliest excuses spewing from the pock marked face of McGwire is the “I only took them to come back from injury, not to enhance my performance.”  Extending your career IS PERFORMANCE ENHANCING.  You would have lost time to the injuries naturally resulting from your body breaking down over time.  But instead you put that needle into your ass to repair those muscles in record time, getting you back on the field and hitting those tainted home runs at historic rates.  Fisk puts that whole lame excuse into it’s correct light:

“That’s a crock,” Fisk said. “There’s a reason they call it performance-enhancing drugs. That’s what it does — performance enhancement. You can be good, but it’s going to make you better. You can be average, but it is going to make you good. If you are below average, it is going to make you average. Some guys who went that route got their five-year, $35 million contracts and now are off into the sunset somewhere. Because once they can’t use (steroids) anymore, they can’t play anymore.

…

“Try having your knees operated on and catching for 30 years,” Fisk said. “Do you think you feel good when you go out there? (McGwire) had to stand around and play first base. So excuuuuuse me.”

The mouth breathing toothless Cardinals nation also appear to be eating up the old cheater adage that “steroids can’t help you hit a baseball.”  What a load of shit.  There’s a reason we all like playing Wiffle Ball, and it has to do with the fact that you can react really, really late on a pitch with that light of a bat.  Standing at the plate looking like Lou Ferrigno with a tooth pick in your hands gives you that same advantage.

“(McGwire) says, ‘Well, it doesn’t help eye-and-hand coordination.’ Well, of course it does. It allows you more acuity physically and mentally and optically. You are going to be stronger and you are going to be better,” said Fisk, who starred for the Red Sox and White Sox.

Fisk also targets Roger Clemens, who is one of the biggest assholes in the history of sports and doesn’t deserve the pass he’s been giving to sail off into the sunset forgotten in this whole steroids debacle.  Good stuff.

“The reason he got let go from the Red Sox was because he was starting to break down,” Fisk said. “His last couple of years in Boston just weren’t very productive, a la ‘The Rocket.’ Then all of a sudden he goes to Toronto and he wants to show somebody something. Then he gets two consecutive Cy Young Awards (in ‘97 and ‘98). Come on, give me a bucket.

The entire interview is great, and hopefully every baseball fan gets a chance to read this and get to hear somebody actually get pissed at their peers instead of just covering up for them.  It would be a great thing to also have more players sack up and start admitting that they think these cheaters are all raging fucktards who ruined the game they loved.  But I’m not holding my breath.  I’m sure the empty suits at ESPN are already devising a way to ignore this or sweep it under the rug so they can get back to tripping over each other declaring McGwire as a Hall of Famer the next time they vote.

The only topic where I part ways with the Hall of Famer is here where he’s diverting responsibility away from baseball and onto the federal government:

“You don’t blame people for not ratting them out; you blame the people who abused the pharmaceutical world,” Fisk said. “It’s not like you are taking a couple of aspirin and you don’t know what’s going on. (Non-prescription steroid use has been) a federal offense for a long time, regardless of whether baseball was recognizing it and putting rules into place. The people who did it … they were breaking the law to start with. It doesn’t have to be a baseball law. They knew what they were doing and the reason they were doing it. Now they are sorry because they are getting called out.”

It is absolutely the responsibility of Major League Baseball to make rules on what substances can and cannot be taken if you want to play their game.  The reason is that all baseball players don’t spend 100% of their time under the jurisdiction of the US Federal government.  During the offseason these players could train in any number of countries with less or no regulation of these drugs, building up the muscle and showing up at spring training a couple weeks late and 35 pounds heavier.  This was a common observation multiple springs in Mesa where the Cubs and Sammy Sosa spend their springs.  It’s not illegal to be a roided up freak, it’s illegal to use steroids without a prescription within US borders.

Add this statue to the Bad Ass Hall of Fame

You can’t fall back on the US laws because you are then giving baseball and cheating players an out by excusing them if they want to abuse performance enhancing drugs in other countries during the off season.  Baseball is responsible for policing their sport.  Stop giving Major League Baseball excuses for being criminally negligent on this topic for decades after the NFL decided to clean itself up.

Baseball execs are trying to tell you right now that the only way to get through this black eye in baseball is to forgive and forget.  No!  The way baseball gets through this is to get pissed about the cheaters.  Try to prove there were some angry good guys in the sport back then who wanted to speak out but thought they would be shouted down by the heads of the game running away with overflowing sacks with the dollar bill sign printed on the sides.  Let us get our fill of this righteous indignation instead of forcing us to repress it.

Shine the light on all the cockroaches, let baseball actually be sorry for this abuse of the game we all love, then strengthen the testing rules and honestly try to make it better.  There is an entire culture in baseball cultivated by Selig and coaches like LaRussa where steroid users are hidden, protected, and secretly encouraged as long as they don’t get caught.  Pressure to be clean by your bosses and peers is the only way these drugs will be squeezed out of the sport.

When Mark McGwire faked coming “clean” last week Bud Selig was ready with open arms to forgive, forget, and declare that this meaningless gesture somehow “puts an end to the steroid era.”  What Selig doesn’t understand is that the era will not be over until he stops this buddying up to the criminals and instead he starts embracing the true heroes of this dark time in baseball.

Like Carlton Fisk.