Afternoon Baseball

Good stuff from Mike, as usual, in his comment...here's the part I especially want to comment on:

I'm so sick of all this steroid talk. It's now clear that a lot of guys were on the stuff. Jose Canseco's book is not going to do anything for the game other than piss a lot of players off by dragging their name through the mud. It's not fair to start listing the guys and try to determine if they were juiced even though most of them probably were. What baseball needs to do now is turn the corner. It's over now, call the last 15 years the steroid era if you wish. Baseball has to make sure the game is clean and credible now, not find the guys that were on the stuff. Selig should know he can control the future, not the past, and how baseball comes out of it's most recent black eye will be how he is judged as commish.

I think that this new steroid policy does a lot to turn the corner. Granted, it's not enough, but it's sure a hell of a lot more than most people reasonably could have expected. I think that raising questions on some of these guys is still important, though -- if it's going to be an issue when the HOF votes come around. If not, then we might as well drop it and move forward. Canseco isn't to be trusted much, either, of course, and his random name-dropping is more akin to a witch-hunt than a solid investigation. So I'll grant that, with reservations.
Absolutely right on Selig, especially as he can point to a Canseco and say, hey man, I was just destroying the Brewers at that point. You know Robin Yount wasn't on steroids.

I don't know the answer on this one: What about Bonds? Skip Bayless of ESPN.com argues that he at least would have been an HOFer regardless, and that makes sense. I guess the best we can hope for, and I say this without malice, is that he tears up his knee or something very early in the season and has to call it a career without passing Ruth or Aaron. Because that's about the only thing I can see stopping him.
Unless it doesn't matter if he breaks the record? I don't know.