The Sports Rumors

So Now What?

Where do you we go from here? We got all the dynamics we could have imagined thrown into one scrum. You have the evil Barry Bonds and you have the mostly liked, respected by all Roger Clemens. You have the hitter and you have the pitcher. You have the good guy and you have the bad guy. You have the race element. You have the family man and you have the adulterer. But the fact remains, both “allegedly” used.

So now what? Everyone screamed for an asterisk next to Bonds name in the hall of fame. Are you going to do that for Clemens? Where do we put the asterisk? Does it go next to every single mark he has? I mean, you can’t just have it for the records. What about his career ERA? What about his wins? What about the Yankees championship teams? Do you put an asterisk next to them, considering the fact that Clemens had arguably the best two game pitching performance in league history; the same year and timeframe he is accused of using.

Everything is tainted. Everything. There is no clear cut right and no clear cut wrong. The entire era is tainted. You can’t single out a few select players who hold records and make them the scapegoats for all the players and owners who are at fault. The following suggestion is not mine, and I want to make sure that is clear. Bob Costas, one who I sometimes love and sometimes hate, is without a doubt an extremely bright individual. His idea goes a little something like this.

Put a page at the beginning of the book of records or somewhere in the hall of fame that makes the following clear: Baseball for as long as we’ve known it, has been tainted in some way shape or form. There was the baseball before integration. There was baseball with all day games versus both day and night games. There was baseball with the flat mound versus the elevated one. There was the cocaine era of the late 1970s. There was clear and rampant gambling in baseball. All these eras preceded the Steroids Era. Fans should be aware that baseball has always had something different taking place, some different era which needs to be taken into careful consideration. Baseball has always adapted for the better. And just like any other era, the Steroids Era has now come to a conclusion. Fans should know that they need to take all eras that made up baseball’s history into consideration when making their own personal judgments about which records mean how much.

I agree with Bob Costas because this is the only way I see feasible and just in making a note in history about what we’ve gone through the past 10-15 years. We don’t need asterisks. We don’t need to blacklist players. We need to simply recognize and state in writing for historical purposes, what exactly happened. You can’t change the past; you can learn from it. A document stating this will show that this unfortunate era happened, was learned from, and that we moved on from it.

Patriots Should Have Asterisk?

Big news of the day was Miami Dolphins hall of fame coach Don Shula making comments suggesting that if the Patriots go 16-0, they should have an asterisk placed by their record due to the events of “Spygate”.

“The Spygate thing has diminished what they’ve accomplished. You would hate to have that attached to your accomplishments. They’ve got it,” Shula told the Daily News yesterday. “Belichick was fined $500,000, the team was fined $250,00 and they lost a first-round draft choice. That tells you the seriousness or significance of what they found.

“I guess you got the same thing as putting an asterisk by Barry Bonds’ home run record. I guess it will be noted that the Patriots were fined and a No.1 draft choice was taken away during that year of accomplishment. The sad thing is Tom Brady looks so good, it doesn’t look like he needs any help.”

When I first heard of this story and these comments, I dismissed it as someone who is just jealous that his record is probably going to be tied and he is bitter because of it. Then I thought some more about what he was saying and I came to realize that Shula had some very valid points. The Patriots were not accused, but convicted of cheating. They were penalized a first round draft choice and fined thousands of dollars. That is a significant verdict/punishment. That isn’t something you can just forget. If we can say that Barry Bonds should have an asterisk next to his homerun record mark, even though he has never been caught cheating, why should we give the Patriots a free pass?

There should not be double standards, ever.

I understand that they are a great team who are absolutely dominating and destroying anyone in their path. I understand that they probably never needed to cheat to be great anyway. But cheating is cheating, and they were caught. By the way, read my last three sentences again and see if it sounds familiar. Barry Bonds was also a dominating force who probably never needed to cheat either to be great. Yet we have convicted him in the court of public opinion so the Pats should be treated the same.

I’m not sure if the asterisk is the best way to go because I haven’t thought about other possibilities yet. However, Don Shula is right when he says that it should be noted, in one way or another, that the Patriots were caught cheating during their “perfect” season.

The Dolphins visit the Patriots in week 15 of the season and could, seriously, be 0-14 vs the 14-0 Pats.  We could be witnesses to irony, karma, whatever you want to call it at its absolute finest.