Selig: No Asterisks Needed
According to Commissioner Bud Selig, no asterisks will be placed on records of players found to have used steroids in the time before baseball began testing for performance-enhancing drugs.
“That would be unfair to do that,” Selig said before a game between the Oakland Athletics and Los Angeles Angels. “In fairness to those players, no one has been convicted of anything. And we can’t turn history back. My job is to protect the integrity of the game. Each era, each decade has had situations where people said there were unfair advantages.”
This is the right answer, no matter how much the nattering nabobs of negativity might disagree.
Of course that’s the way to do it! Otherwise you have to put an asterisk next to everyones name. “These players were not tested for steroids; they may have cheated at one time or another.”
March 8th, 2005 at 13:37In the end, it’s not terribly much different than the change from the dead baseball to a live one, or the standardization of park sizes, or the change in the mound height, or anything else that allows you to delineate baseball into eras. The 1990s and early 2000s will simply be known as the “Steroids and Tiny Ballparks Era”.
March 8th, 2005 at 17:49