#ped use

[backbracebruin]

Canó kind of reminds me of Barry Bonds in the sense that he has such natural ability and talent, and for whatever reason, it's just not good enough for him.

[fsugatepost]

Ferr or Foul?: PED use was part of baseball, should be part of HOF

By Michael Ferris

Sports Editor

From the Mariners, to the Rangers, to the Yankees and some hundreds of millions of dollars later, Alex Rodriguez saw his 660th home run fly over the Green Monster at Fenway Park Friday night. The home run pulled him even with baseball great Willie Mays, for fourth all-time.

When someone mentions the name Rodriguez, one can’t help but think steroids and performance enhancing drug (PED) use, which is fair because A-Rod served a full season worth of suspension for his involvement with PEDs. This long, drawn-out history has led to some labeling him with the nickname, “A-Roid.”

No matter what you call him, whether it’s A-Rod or A-Roid, Rodriguez belongs in the Hall of Fame, as do many others who have used PEDs.

The list of users who have accomplished great things in baseball is long. Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa, Roger Clemens and Barry Bonds are all players who have been on the ballot and been denied entry into Cooperstown - and it appears Rodriguez may be soon to follow in their footsteps.

All four aforementioned players not only deserve to be in the Hall of Fame, but deserved to be first-ballot selections - and the same goes for A-Rod.

Like it or not, through the 1990s and 2000s, baseball became tainted. Former AL MVP and two-time World Series Champion Jose Canseco estimated that 80 percent of players have used PEDs at some point, while former NL MVP Ken Caminiti estimated that number to be around 50 percent. Those are both extremely high figures if the two are at all accurate.

If this is true, this means pitchers and hitters alike were cheating at extremely high rates, and, using Canseco’s figure, if 80 percent of ballplayers are using, does one really have an advantage? If Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens are both on steroids and facing off against one another, don’t they cancel each other out?

I understand the argument that not everyone is using and therefore a PED user does have an advantage, but if more than half of the league was taking PEDs, they still were unable to accomplish what Bonds did, setting the home run mark with ease, as he sits in first all-time with 762. This means you can’t take anything away from what the man did.

Sure, people like Mays, Hank Aaron and Babe Ruth weren’t on PEDs, but that’s irrelevant - that was a different era of baseball.

If people like Bonds and Clemens aren’t going to make it, then the sad truth is that no one should be getting elected into the Hall anymore. The rare exception is for people like Greg Maddux and Ken Griffey Jr., players who still managed terrific numbers, keeping up with the “cheaters,” without the help of PEDs.

It’s unfortunate, but in the Steroid Era, the people who put up numbers were on PEDs and if players like Clemens and Bonds, guys who set records, are not going to be allowed into Cooperstown, then no one who has taken steroids should be.

With that being said, if the steroid users aren’t allowed to be in the Hall of Fame, who does that leave? It leaves players who played clean and players that, at best, are mediocre - again with the exception of the Griffey’s and the Maddux’s.

If Major League Baseball wants to punish PED users, more power to it, but it will end up either electing no one into Cooperstown, or mediocre players who stayed clean. Like it or not, the best players of the Steroid Era were players on steroids. Players like Bonds, Clemens, Sosa, McGwire and, eventually, A-Rod all should be inducted into the Hall of Fame.

[focusmatters-blog]

Cyber multi tasking

Waiting to fly, all those round me at the airport were connected. Smartphone, not so smart phones, really, really dumb phones (only used for talking and texting), laptops, iPads, kindles.

Onboard passengers whip out hand held games, iPads, kindles, and any other PED allowed. They talk, type, read and play.

Waiting for the Bainbridge Island ferry to leave from Seattle is a line of cars. As I walk by I see the young and the elderly, everyone is using some kind of electronic device. One couple, at least 60 years of age, were chatting but not to each other. She was actually talking on her cell phone, he was texting on his. Young fellow has his laptop on the arm of his car, as he works on some kind of “I have to do this now” thing. Countless smart phones, drivers checking email, twitter accounts, googling as they fish for information. The nearby McDonalds provides the wifi, onboard the ferry will.

Every driver and passenger was connected to a world separate from the ferry line. On board at every table there were lap tops and handhelds, the typing, the talking the reading begins again. One woman uses her lap top and her smart phone in concert.

Later in a restaurant there are smart phones and iPads on tables by each diner. We are surrounded by some of the most amazing scenery, marinas, flowers, bays, no one is looking. Some diners are texting and talking to someone who is not in the room. Lone diners provide a strange cadence. Instead of the reciprocal murmuring usually heard in restaurants, there is now murmur, silence, murmur, silence. It sounds like the orchestra is playing only half of the score.

What happened to reflection time, to dreaming the dream time, to hatching the next best seller movie or novel time?

Is one of the unintended consequences of the cyber age the fact that now not only do we multi task we do it in multi dimensions? Are we driven to tweet, post and pin for fun, profit and pleasure 24x7? Has “let your fingers do the walking” taken on a whole new meaning?

Wait, wait, I can’t answer that now, I am writing this on my smart phone.