By now, the Bugs and Cranks post taking Bill James to task on his paragraph in 2008's Gold Mine -- which loosely mentions Kirby Puckett and Gary Gaetti in the same breath as steroids -- is old news. Our boy Josh Alper has given his take too. We get it: It's not cool to bust on Puckett and the Twins for things we do not know. Still, the outrage is not universal. The Hardball Times' Dave Studeman called the Bugs and Cranks headline irresponsible, and Rob Neyer pointed out the irony in a place named Bugs and Cranks taking issue with a slight bit of snark lodged in a deep analytical essay.
There is another bit of irony here, and it's that, all of a sudden, it seems taboo to speculate about players' steroid use. I don't see James' graph as any worse than rhetoric about Tony La Russa facilitating a steroids culture in his locker rooms, or jokingly guessing with your friends which players were on the juice. Since when is this such a big deal? Why all the outrage? Last time I checked, it was the mainstream baseball media's job to be indignant on command. Us blogs -- we're supposed to have a sense of humor. Getting all frothy about a one-off is a pretty incongruous thing for a blog to do.
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Reader Comments ( Page 1 of 1)
1. 1) The man(Kirby) isn't around to defend himself. Pretty much a dick move to indirectly accuse someone when you know they can't counter.
2) It was written in a supposedly serious publication, which means that more people are going to take the accusation seriously since it came out of a something that supposedly was written to inform not just entertain. When you read something on a blog, you take it with a grain of salt. When it comes out of something written by a well-respected baseball man, the grain is a quite a bit smaller.
Posted at 6:11PM on Apr 5th 2008 by Bender