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Here come the Chris Davis PED suspicions
Craig Calcaterra
Jul 1, 2013, 5:44 PM EDT
94 Comments
Chris Davis
Aaron noted just how crazy a season Chris Davis is having. And when you have a weekend like he had against a team with a big national profile like the Yankees, it sort of puts all of that in relief. And that, sadly, has brought out the PED suspicions. From Baltimore Sports Report:
A simple search on Twitter for the query “Chris Davis steroids” brings up a slew of tweets from baseball fans worldwide over the past few days with blatant accusations that Davis must be juicing. Things like “It’s time to test Chris Davis for steroids” and “He has to be cheating” were popping up left and right all throughout Saturday and Sunday. Davis even responded to one fan on Sunday afternoon with a simple “No” when asked “Are you on steroids?”
I can confirm the Twitter thing, as I went looking for that myself this morning (do the search yourself) and found no shortage of people flat accusing Davis of taking PEDs. I didn’t hear the report, but I’m told that a host or guest on a Dallas sports talk radio station was engaging in such speculation this morning too.
You may say “hey, it’s just jerks on Twitter,” but the fact is they are baseball fans. And they didn’t just independently invent the notion that a guy who hits a lot of home runs should automatically be assumed to be taking performance enhancing drugs. No, that speculation — utterly baseless speculation; Davis has always had tremendous power but is now, in the past year, matched it up with better plate discipline — is the product of a media landscape which has decided that every power hitter is a ‘roider. Jose Bautista got this treatment a couple of years ago. Davis is getting it now. Everyone who engages in this business does so because they’ve been convinced by the baseball media that such speculation is not just justified but necessary.
It’s neither of those things. The drug testing system put in place had avoiding these parlor games as one of its primary justifications. But that’s not good enough for some, apparently.
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