Quote:
Originally Posted by Baby Lee
There is a qualitative difference between 'performance enhancement' and 'staying healthy'
I'm no supporter of 'cheaters' but it continues and continues to strike me as wierd that the argument that these guys are bad people is that they took something that kept them healthy and helped them heal from injury.
The stance that people should suffer injury without regeneration outside the 'natural order' in order for their achievements to mean anything to us, the viewing public, seems on SOME level as craven as the stance that cheating isn't a big deal.
And I don't buy for a second penchief's half-warmed argument that 'cheating that gets results is worse than cheating that doesn't.' Cheating is cheating insofar as something is actually banned and you consume it. If you consume something that isn't banned at the time you consume it, but later is, you are not a cheater, but that says nothing about how we should look on your achievements in relation to a later cheater. Whether you cheated, and whether you inflated your performance are two distinct questions.
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And I don't understand why people keep ignoring the gist of my argument in order to accuse me of arguing something that I'm not.
As I said, I don't condone cheating. Nor do I condone the use of amphetamines. But until you can prove to me that amphetamines impacted the record books in any way, let alone as dramatically as steroids have, you won't convince me that I'm wrong simply by painting my argument to be something that it isn't.
The power statistics put up by guys like Bonds, McGwire, and Sosa when they were juicing are a statistical anomoly directly attributed to use of steroids. Had they not used steroids their numbers would have been no greater than what they had produced before and no greater than those who came before them in baseball history (taking into account the smaller ball parks, of course).
For that reason, guys who were not on a Hall of Fame track before they started juicing should not receive HOF consideration based on fraudulent numbers that were a result of their juicing. McGwire and Sosa both fall into that category, as far as I'm concerned.