Sportsfrog.com

…continues. Rick Telander in the Chicago Sun-Times with the relevant quotes from Friday’s edition of Commissioner denial shenanigans:

”Am I sensitive about people saying we ignored this problem?” Selig asked reporters in Glendale, Ariz., on Friday. ”You bet I am. And it’s wrong. It’s just wrong.”

Oh, okay then. It’s wrong? It’s just wrong? Man, that’s convincing. My bad for trusting reason, observation, and logic over your protestations that the basball overlords ignored the problem. That you yourself ignored the problem.

Once a used car salesman, always a used car salesman, I would guess.

So, Darryl, would you have used steroids if you would have had an opportunity to do so during your playing days? Quoth Strawberry:

“Hell, yeah, I would have used them. Are you kidding me?” Strawberry said as he kicked off a week as a guest instructor at Mets camp, during a defense of Alex Rodriguez. “You know what, it’s just the point of being in sports. In our nature we’re competitive creatures. We have a tremendous drive and high tolerance and all of these things in us.

“I’m not saying that was the right thing to do,” Strawberry continued, referring to A-Rod’s steroid use. “But if somebody asked me if I would have faced it, what would I have done if that was going on in the era of the ’80s, it definitely probably would have been in my system, too. I probably would have been a part of it, too. And I wouldn’t have denied it, because you guys know I don’t deny anything.”

Then again, Strawberry clearly didn’t have many issues with foreign substances in his body during those years.

Words of wisdom from the Mets’ one-week guest instructor. Perhaps the Mets should keep Strawberry away from their minor leaguers.

Not a good idea. But once upon a time, used as such, by 1904 Olympic Marathon winner Thomas Hicks. During the race. Courtesy of a shadowy associate (we call them “cousins” nowadays). Really great read for a Sunday morning from the Boston Globe on the story of Hicks and a brief overview on just how long athletes have sought chemical help to boost performance. It has gone on awhile. From the Globe:

Martin said that newspapers did not trumpet the fact that Hicks had taken strychnine, because “it was sort of routine for people to take performance-enhancing substances back in those days.” But word got out, and the villain became Lucas, not Hicks, for violating the spirit of the sport. A formal protest over the unfair advantage eventually reached the Olympic Games director, but he refused to consider it, and the results stood.

Where did the outrage stem? From the unlevel playing field, apparently:

Back in those days, the use of performance-enhancing substances was not the awful thing it is today,” said Daniel M. Rosen, the author of “Dope: A History of Performance Enhancement in Sports from the Nineteenth Century to Today.” Rosen said it was not Hicks’s chemical consumption that caused the 1904 controversy. Rather, the outrage stemmed from the strychnine cocktails not being available to all Olympic runners in the searing, 90-degree heat. “Hicks was kind of a hero for doing everything he could to win,” Rosen said. “But he damn near killed himself in the process.”

The other thing worth reading the article for is the description of the marathon race itself. August in St. Louis with a 3:00 pm start? It’s like they wanted runners to die. Plus, there was confusion at the finish with a runner who had dropped out of the race who grabbed a cab and then jogged the last five miles to the finish as a “joke” in first while Hicks staggered into the stadium half dead.

Great read.