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Palmeiro is a different kind of baseball legend: who wants to live to be 100, anyway? Pass the Raffy Juice!

Sporting News, The, August 19, 2005 by Dave Kindred

When the Orioles scheduled "Rafael Palmeiro Day" in celebration of the slugger's 3,000th hit and his advance toward the 600-home run level--where he would join Henry Aaron and Willie Mays as the only men to reach both those numbers--it seemed the right thing to do.

It's not likely that many people outside of Baltimore changed vacation plans to be at Camden Yards on August 14. Palmeiro's career had been built in silence, with no sensational records, no World Series heroics, no self-absorbed theatrics. Until he pointed a finger at those congressional bloodhounds and said, "Period," Palmeiro might have been best known as the only professional athlete hunk endorsing Viagra.

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That moment of unequivocal denial on Capitol Hill changed everything. Certainly, the contrast in demeanor helped Palmeiro. Shamefaced Mark McGwire squirmed like a man with terminal jock itch. Sammy Sosa developed a previously unknown aversion to speaking English. Jose Canseco denied the validity, if not the veracity, of his own words. Rafael Palmeiro, handsome and elegant, pointed a finger and said, "I have never used steroids. Period. I don't know how to say it any more clearly than that. Never."

With that declaration on March 17, with his condemnation of Canseco for having written that he injected Palmeiro with steroids, and with the story of his family's escape to America from "the communist tyranny that still reigns over my homeland of Cuba," Palmeiro gained national attention that his work in baseball had never earned. He moved from anonymity to respect. He became a first-ballot lock for the Hall of Fame.

And now?

Now we know that the Palmeiro "period" might better have been a comma followed by "except on special occasions, such as days that end in 'y.'"

No player ever has fallen more quickly from favor. Period.

Raffy's day has been called off. Most likely, his first-ballot election to Cooperstown won't happen, either, though it's not nearly as black and white an issue as many would make it. It's a gray area.

The use of most steroids without a doctor's prescription has been illegal in the United States since 1991. Other sports and the Olympics banned steroids as performance-enhancing drugs. But only in 2002 did baseball put steroids on its banned-substances list, and only last year did it test for steroids. Anyone who used steroids without a prescription after 1991 was committing a criminal act. He might have known the use was unethical. Until 2002, however, he was not violating any rule of competition in Major League Baseball.

Mark McGwire, instead of squirming, should have said, "Yeah, I used steroids. Wouldn't you? Look, they wanted us to, or there'd have been rules against it." He could have mentioned pitchers in their late 30s and early 40s who maintained the velocity of their 20s. In this Hitters vs. Pitchers scenario, a Mad magazine reader thinks of the "Spy vs. Spy" cartoon, in which everybody is out to get everybody by whatever means necessary.

Yes, baseball's statistical history has been distorted by steroids. Is that reason enough to keep Cooperstown's doors shut against players who dominated their era? The numbers are skewed up, and no one will ever mistake Rafael Palmeiro for Henry Aaron or Willie Mays. The numbers also appear to be steroided up: At age 25, Palmeiro hit a home run every 42.7 at-bats; at 37, a home run every 12.7 at-bats. In 1990, he led the league in singles. In 1993, his first full season with Jose Canseco as a teammate, Palmeiro jumped from 22 home runs to 37. He hit 95 home runs in his first seven seasons; after Canseco's arrival, Palmeiro hit 99 in three seasons.

It is yet true--if sadly true--that Palmeiro played under the prevailing rules. Think of Ty Cobb. Under his day's rules, he had 4,189 hits. What if he had played his entire career with a live ball? Would he have had 5,000? Maybe 3,000? Just as McGwire and Barry Bonds did stuff in their time that thousands of other big leaguers failed to do, so did Palmeiro rise above the crowd.

Maybe Canseco's claim that 80 percent of players used steroids was hyperbole. But it's naive to think that only a few players did it. Palmeiro's body wasn't cartooned up. But who said it needed to be? A singles hitter doesn't need to be a weight-lifting Paul Bunyan to add the 25 feet that makes him a home run hitter. And the well-documented health risks mean little to the obsessed competitors at the game's highest level. The old pitcher Jim Bouton recently told the Boston Globe, "If there was a pill that guaranteed a pitcher 20 wins but took five years off his life, we would take it."

Incentives of victory, celebrity and wealth cause people to do strange things. They might even cause some people to lie to Congress.

DAVE KINDRED

dkindred@sportingnews.com

Palmeiro is a different kind of baseball legend: who wants to live to be 100, anyway? Pass the Raffy Juice!

Sporting News, The, August 19, 2005 by Dave Kindred

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