We the Fans

After McGwire's confession to using PED's, I think something needs to be cleared up. This is aimed towards the people who think steroid-users "owe us fans an apology" or that "we have been cheated".

Baseball is a professional sport where the best  players on the planet meet to play against each other. They don't do it for "us fans" or for the "purity of baseball". They play simply because they're talented enough to earn their paycheck by playing a sport they started to play as a kid and love to this day. They, of course, try to become the best player possible, whether through countless hours of scouting reports or workouts on the diamond and in the weight room. It's make or break for most of these guys-they either hit baseballs for a living or they get the average construction or janitor job, because a baseball player was what they were aspiring to become when they grow up and they didn't really have a Plan B. Now imagine yourself in their shoes. You can do one of two things:

 

a) Take a substance that has a ban which isn't enforced. It's not moral and not completely fair, but it'll give you an edge over the comptetition.

b) Refuse the substance and hope that the other 700+ guys who play at the Major League level refuse them too. If you don't make it and are working night shifts to help feed your kids in the future...well, at least you can say that you didn't break the rules or put your toe across the line.

Obviously, in the beginning of the Steroid Era, most players chose choice A. They were willing to do anything to achieve their dream of becoming a Major League Baseball player, even if it came back and bit them in the ass a decade or two down the line. They knew the competition was stiff, and that a bad couple of months on the diamond can alter your future. And as everyone knows, baseball is a dog eat dog world. And we the fans have made it that way. We the fans wanted to see Bonds and Sosa hitting bombs over the fence, and even though we won't admit it, we didn't care back then whether they were juicing or not. We didn't care what immoral things they did, we just wanted entertainment. Now, 15 years later, we want to refuse Mark McGwire his place in Cooperstown. Now it's a problem he juiced, because now we have "clean, pure and gritty" examples in baseball, who will condemn all their actions, not admitting that they were the players that inspired them when they were playing Little League. We have sports writers, who made their money writing about how great these guys were. Now they make their money writing about what terrible, immoral people they are-because that's public opinion, and they're trying to voice it. Even though not entirely, we are responsible for all the confessions and finger-pointing.

McGwire, Sosa, Pettite, A-Rod, Bonds....they don't owe us an apology. We owe it to them.