Human Growth Hormone, MLB, and Journalists
By Blogger
Just a quick observation...
Yesterday, Mark Donohue of Bad Altitude mused about what the mainstream sports media's position on the Jason Grimsley affair will be (he doesn't reference Jeff Pearlman), and it's already coming to pass.
-This column on ESPN.com takes the tone of "let's educate people on what HGH is and why players might use it", complete with FAQ sidebar.
-This New York Times piece takes the same educational tack. However, it doesn't completely drop the pretense that the MLB steroid policy works, as the headline is "A New Front in Baseball's Drug War".
The sad thing is, as Donohue points out, only now that Jason Grimsley has run his mouth to the FBI one afternoon will MLB media insiders acknowledge that ballplayers are almost certainly skirting the drug policy with impunity. I may just have a freak memory, but my first encounter with HGH in the media was during the Sydney Olympics, in 2000, when Australian swimmer Ian Thorpe was hounded by accusations of PED use. So, HGH has been on my radar for a while. What? You mean baseball writers might not care about some swimmer? They had no warning about HGH? Feast your eyes on the Big Bang document, from December 2004, the article by Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams reporting on Jason Giambi's grand jury testimony. It's in the damn lede that Giambi admitted using human growth hormone! HGH use in MLB isn't new. It just isn't a new revelation. Saying that it's new and acting like it's new means that the journalists didn't acknowledge it before, meaning they were either willfully ignorant or they don't know what the hell they're talking about.
Yesterday, Mark Donohue of Bad Altitude mused about what the mainstream sports media's position on the Jason Grimsley affair will be (he doesn't reference Jeff Pearlman), and it's already coming to pass.
-This column on ESPN.com takes the tone of "let's educate people on what HGH is and why players might use it", complete with FAQ sidebar.
-This New York Times piece takes the same educational tack. However, it doesn't completely drop the pretense that the MLB steroid policy works, as the headline is "A New Front in Baseball's Drug War".
The sad thing is, as Donohue points out, only now that Jason Grimsley has run his mouth to the FBI one afternoon will MLB media insiders acknowledge that ballplayers are almost certainly skirting the drug policy with impunity. I may just have a freak memory, but my first encounter with HGH in the media was during the Sydney Olympics, in 2000, when Australian swimmer Ian Thorpe was hounded by accusations of PED use. So, HGH has been on my radar for a while. What? You mean baseball writers might not care about some swimmer? They had no warning about HGH? Feast your eyes on the Big Bang document, from December 2004, the article by Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams reporting on Jason Giambi's grand jury testimony. It's in the damn lede that Giambi admitted using human growth hormone! HGH use in MLB isn't new. It just isn't a new revelation. Saying that it's new and acting like it's new means that the journalists didn't acknowledge it before, meaning they were either willfully ignorant or they don't know what the hell they're talking about.
posted by Blogger at 12:59 PM
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