There were three groups who worked in concert to really help the steroid era in baseball grow to the epic heights it eventually reached. There were the players taking the drugs, obviously, and the teams who looked the other way when their players showed up with new bodies and new productivity out of the blue. And then there was the media which sat in the clubhouse, heard the rumors and chose to turn players like Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire into paragons of virtue during the late 90's. Bud Selig has said that the first two groups are off the hook, more or less, but one member of the media admitted that he wasn't doing his best when it came to the steroid issue. Nashville Scene covered a recent speaking engagement with a candid Buster Olney.
Last Tuesday at the Wildhorse Saloon, ESPN's Buster Olney owned up: "I think I did a lousy job covering the steroid issue," he told the audience at the Nashville Sports Council's First Pitch Luncheon. In other words, he did a good job of not covering the steroid issue in those dark and fateful years B.M. (Before Mitchell).I'm not sure what the exact moment was when Sosa and McGwire went from "saving" baseball to tarnishing the game's integrity but the shift was pretty complete among those covering the game. For all the calls to keep such players out of Cooperstown there's been little self-assessment like Olney's. And while Olney's statements are appreciated, it's a bit telling that he gave them at a Nashville luncheon and not on his widely-read ESPN blog.
(H/T Steroid Nation)
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
4-25-2008 @ 11:07PM
Vegas Watch said...
I am pretty sure- not positive- that Olney has previously said pretty much the same thing in his blog. I stopped reading it about a year ago, but I think I remember seeing that somewhere.
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