King Kaufman's Sports Daily
Steroids fatigue: Have we heard enough about performance-enhancing drugs? Plus: Zimmer has advice for Yankees. Our advice: Do the opposite!
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May 1, 2007 | Are we reaching steroids fatigue?
I'm wondering because the guilty plea April 27 of former New York Mets batboy and clubhouse attendant Kirk Radomski, which seemed like something of a blockbuster story to me, wasn't treated that way over the weekend by the national media.
It was a busier than normal weekend, with the NBA playoffs, the NHL playoffs -- trust me on that, Americans, they're happening -- the NFL draft and the death of St. Louis Cardinals relief pitcher Josh Hancock.
Still, a guy pleading guilty to dealing performance-enhancing drugs to major league players for 10 years using the connections he'd made the previous decade working in a big-league clubhouse, a plea that includes his agreement to continue cooperating with law enforcement and baseball's own drug investigation, that seems like a big deal to me. This could -- might not, but could -- lead to dozens of heretofore unimplicated ballplayers being named as PED users.
I thought it was big and that's why I wrote about it Monday.
And I got what I found to be a surprising number of letters from readers asking why I wasted a whole column on steroids when there were NBA and NHL playoffs, the NFL draft and the death of a baseball player to write about.
I get a lot of those letters. Comes with the territory of being a one-person sports department. I can't write about every story every day, and since sports seasons, events and news stories have an inconvenient way of overlapping, there's always someone who's clicking over looking for coverage of something that isn't being covered here that day.
But that doesn't happen if the story's big enough. And it happened Monday.
Maybe I'm reading too much into a few cranky postings, and it's worth noting that my page-view numbers Monday were toward the upper boundary of normal. So it's not as though I can add steroids to the NHL and women's basketball as a subject I can write about when I don't want to be bothered with readers. Quite the contrary, it seems.
But that reaction combined with the tepid play the story got nationally -- I think it was possible to pay pretty close attention to the sports world over the weekend without noticing any coverage of the Radomski plea -- makes me think we as a republic are starting to say, "Enough with the steroids. We get it. Ballplayers take performance-enhancing drugs. The rest is details we'd rather not know, thanks. Now what time's the game on?"
I think that's how we as a republic talk. I've been missing the meetings.