Steroids and Statistics

Players who use steroids have brought the game of baseball lower in the public's eye than it's been since I've been alive. And even way too many of the players who are clean are partially responsible for baseball's tarnished imagine because they bowed at the feet of the player's union who continually resisted drug testing until public pressure wouldn't allow it any longer.

With all of that aside, I'm having a difficult time understanding the comments that Frank Robinson and Curt Schilling made recently regarding Rafael Palmeiro's statistics. Here's what they said:

Frank Robinson: "Where do you go back, stop and say, 'OK, when did he start using steroids?' To eliminate all that, and get the players' attention, you wipe the whole thing out."

Curt Schilling said that he agreed with Robinson about Palmeiro: "Yeah. I read something the other day about his career, his career numbers and how a lot of his career numbers coincide with certain dates, and he obviously sat next to me in Washington and lied. So I don't know there's any way to prove that anything he did was not under the influence of performance-enhancing drugs."

I understand their frustration, but wiping out Palmeiro's records doesn't make any sense to me. Why not wipe out Gaylord Perry's statistics? Or the statistics of every other pitcher who doctored the ball in some for or fashion? Or why not wipe out the statistics of Sammy Sosa and Albert Bell? Surely their use of corked bats wasn't a one time event. No, we don't have proof, but do we have proof that Palmeiro was on steroids when he put up all those numbers? We suspect it, but we don't know for sure.

Robinson and Schilling sound like people who want to make an example out of somebody. Examples are okay, but they don't solve the problem. But if all managers and (clean) players took a more active role in policing the use of steroids rather than pretending it doesn't happen, real changes could be made. Yes, that would mean confrontations, but so what? The reputation of the game is at stake.