The New York Times continues the carnage of baseball on steroids

The New York Times seems to be digging out all angles in the MLB steroids story.  Today the Times asks if Joe Torre's legacy is tainted by the mega-use of PEDs by the Yankees.

Joe Torre was not mentioned in the Mitchell report. There was no reason he should have been. But the report raises a question about Torre indirectly, as it does directly about Roger Clemens and Barry Bonds and their chances for election to the Hall of Fame.

When the Yankees won their third successive World Series and fourth in five years in 2000, Torre, their manager, was hailed as an automatic entrant to the Hall of Fame. Now, however, it develops that the Yankees’ 2000 team was loaded with players who used performance-enhancing drugs before, during or after that season.

Much talk about individual achievements, but little about the meaning of team records, and team championships in the juiced era.  So what about it?

Between the Mitchell report and unsealed affidavits filed by law enforcement officials, the count has reached 10, including Clemens, Denny Neagle and Jason Grimsley. Others named included Andy Pettitte, Chuck Knoblauch, Mike Stanton and David Justice, but the use for which they are cited occurred after the 2000 World Series.

It may be far-fetched to question whether Torre could be tainted by the steroids fallout, but there are critics who say baseball should do something about records possibly enhanced by steroids use, so why should a team be any different from a player? If you want to question many of Bonds’s 762 home runs and Clemens’s 354 victories, look at teams’ achievements, too.

The hard decisions remain.  Do the records of the juiced era stand, as monuments to corruption and to apathy?  Or does baseball show an intolerance of the drug-corrupted championships?  Apathy or action?

Comments

[Nicholas Haber]

Interesting take on Torre. Is he the Remy Korchemny or Trevor Graham of baseball? Probably not, he didn't provide the dope to these guys, but did he enable them? Did he know what was going on and turn a blind eye? Probably.

Tough to single out Torre though. I'm sure every manager had some pumped up players. Torre just gets the stain because more New York guys were included in the Mitchell report. Mitchell was able to roll over on a couple of New York dope peddlers. That doesn't mean that New York was the only team that had them.