Collier: Baseball's post-steroids era is tough to swallow
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Depending on whether you started the clock in 2003, when Major League Baseball began testing for performance-enhancing drugs, or in '05, when it actually started suspending its cheaters, the approaching baseball season is either year seven or year nine of what baseball loves to call its post-steroids era.
Really.
You gotta be careful how you label these things, boys.
Looks like that post-steroids era label desperately needed some fine print after all:
Do not take internally.
That's legalese for "you're not about to swallow that are ya?"
Make no mistake, I wanted to ingest it as much or more than anyone, but the spring training at hand is virtually screaming with caution.
You almost had to laugh last weekend when the Commissioner of Baseball pondered the issue of whether the Pirates should be allowed to trade for A.J. Burnett, given the rejiggered salary models agreed upon with the New York Yankees, while he simultaneously demurred on the matter of two-time drug offender Manny Ramirez being pursued and signed by the Oakland A's.
Perhaps Bud Selig simply didn't want to mess with Billy Beane's Oscar buzz.
Beane went from modestly successful baseball metrics alchemist to full-blown Hollywood hero on the crest of the '11 film "Moneyball," a pretty good movie that, while terribly out of place among the nominees for Best Picture Sunday, is nowhere near as out of place as Manny Ramirez in anybody's baseball uniform in the post-steroids era.
Baseball not only had no issue with the A's signing Manny to a minor league contract, it agreed with the players' union that, since Manny spent almost all of '11 in "retirement" rather than serve a 100-game suspension, his second in two years, his sentence should be reduced to 50 games this time around.
Seriously.
Amnesty for steroid cheats in the post-steroid era.
Manny might never get another big league at-bat, obviously. He'll be 40 in May as his suspension plays out, and the A's are betting $500,000 that he's not the same Manny who went 1 for 17 until retiring from the Tampa Bay Rays last spring or the same Manny who had one homer in 88 at-bats for the Chicago White Sox the year before.
But that's not the point.
The point is that Ramirez is obviously at the baseball career stage once perfectly described to me as "finally learning to say hello just when it's time to say good-bye," and here we have a celebrated, spotlighted MLB franchise with zero compunctions about throwing half a million dollars in the spring of '12 at one of the faces that comprise the Mount Rushmore of the pre-post steroids era.
First Published February 23, 2012 12:00 am
