Sometimes we all need a reminder that steroids, although it has become a huge issue in the past decade, has rooted itself in the landscape of baseball much earlier than the seasons that Mark McGwire and Barry Bonds broke single-season home run records. No no, former Reds and Marlins trainer Larry Starr reminds us, through the prism of his experience, that steroids have been a problem long before then."Here's the thing that really bothers me," Starr said in a recent interview with FLORIDA TODAY. "They sit there, meaning the commissioner's office, Bud Selig and that group, and the players' association, Don Fehr and that group ... they sit there and say, 'Well, now that we know that this happened we're going to do something about it. I have notes from the Winter Meetings where the owners group and the players' association sat in meetings with the team physicians and team trainers. I was there. And team physicians stood up and said, 'Look, we need to do something about this. We've got a problem here if we don't do something about it.' That was in 1988."It's clear where Starr puts the blame in this whole steroid mess, and he took an interesting tact when steroids fell in his lap...
"My whole thing is, I don't totally blame the players," Starr said. "They didn't abuse the system. They used the system. The system was such that there was no testing so ... the bad thing was it really put the medical people in a bad situation. If we couldn't test, there was no way we could accuse somebody point blank that they were using some type of performance-enhancing substance."That last line seems to me more proof that you can legislate all you want, if a player is desperate to go on the juice to enhance his career (among other things), there's not going to be much that could stop him. Even though androstenedione was starting to be frowned upon, players still wanted to take it.
Starr said he first realized a player was using steroids on the Reds in 1984.
"Here's the position I took," he said. "If I can't test, if I can't do anything objective with them, what I told my players was come on in (the training room). If you've got any questions, we'll close the door, close the blinds, there will be no papers, no pencils and what do you want to know. And I'd tell them everything I knew."
Several players came to Starr after their bodies had strange reactions to steroids, and he tried to guide them. With so much money in the game, it was only logical there would be a lot of experimentation. And it continued when he left Cincinnati to join the expansion Marlins in the 1990s.
"When Mark McGwire was discovered taking androstenedione, when that hit ESPN, four players walked into my office within an hour and asked, 'Where can I get androstenedione,' " Starr said.
That being said, one could make the argument that Starr may have done more harm than good by keeping the problems of his players' under wraps, and not "ratting them out". But to him, his interest wasn't in embarrassing individual players like most people seem to want to do today by way of this Mitchell list, but in getting baseball to tackle the problem as a whole. If they had listened then, perhaps the problems wouldn't be as widespread in baseball as they are right now. Instead here we are, with baseball trying to tackle the problems by pulling out the individual branches rather than cutting it off at its roots ... which are so strong now that it may no longer be an option.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
11-27-2007 @ 9:11AM
theomnivore said...
The steroid problem is worse than who thinks? Are there sports fans (specifically baseball fans) left who think that athletes don't overwhelmingly use PEDs? Are you one of them? Of course everyone has been using steroids and illegal PEDs for decades. I can't wait until George Mitchell says (i'll paraphrase here), "The entire culture of baseball relies on players using illegal drugs to enhance their power and to heal from injuries." Then no one has to act surprised and/or outraged every time we find out that another player risked possibly maybe some years off his life so he could earn $10 million (at minimum).
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11-27-2007 @ 11:49AM
Grer The Sarcastic Bastard said...
Poetic justice for me would be to see Selig on trial in a Federal Grand Jury denying he knew anything about steroids prior to '98.
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11-27-2007 @ 12:12PM
just wonderin said...
Good article. Many have suggested it...and I find it curious...that with people like Bud Selig, steriods the dirty little secret everyone seems to know about, no one addressed and allowed it, yes I said allowed it to roll down the path, gaining speed until it ran over Bonds. And, in the wake of how the Bond's scenario is continuing to be played out, we have heard of the newest latest list of names floating around Washington, DC or maybe the commish's office, their efforts to get steroids out of baseball is disingenuous and sanctimonious. How can you clean up baseball if the ones overseeing it were part of the problem by turning a blind eye to the problem? How can something dirty get itself clean? There were a lot of them cheating...Bonds for various reasons will be the poster boy for all time. People point to the fact he lied in the grand jury testimony...but most fans spit more about the cheating. Is that fair? If not for the home run record, would he be a name we would mention like McGwire, Sosa, Canseco with some disdain, and not the hatred spewed at Bonds?
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11-27-2007 @ 3:02PM
Frederick said...
I will always say
Media is just as much to blame
I find it funny that everyone knew but the media didn`t
Journalist are hypocrites they act like they just found out Santa did not exist
Fooling the fans is one thing but journalists that followed players daily trought the season had to know
This entire story as put baseball from my favorite sport to I hardly watch a couple innings of the world series.
Steroids have been a part of sports for a long time.
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11-27-2007 @ 4:20PM
Fornelli said...
Are the steroids pictured the ones Greg Anderson gave Barry on Valentine's Day?
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11-27-2007 @ 4:21PM
MailmanZ said...
Good post, Mullet. What's your opinion about this? Was Kevin Ryan removed for his handling of the BALCO situation. Because he doesn't exactly deny it.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2007/06/17/MNGG0QG5N51.DTL&type=printable
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