Maury
01-23-2007, 03:52 PM
Thought this might interest some here... An interview with Ken Rosenthal of Fox Sports on The Biz of Baseball (http://www.bizofbaseball.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=611&Itemid=35). Here's one Q&A
BizBall: This year’s Hall of Fame voting is in the books, and unsurprisingly, McGwire didn’t get enough votes. You, like many others, wrote of why you wouldn’t be voting for him, and you made it clear that you won’t be voting for any suspected steroid users on the first ballot. My question is this… Has the specter of steroids in baseball created a level of undue suspicion in MLB? Has it created an environment in which any player that is homerun prodigious is now “suspected of steroid use”?
Rosenthal: The answer is yes, and I’m not happy about it; it’s as if the pendulum has swung too far the other way. People ask all the time, “Where were you guys” – meaning reporters – “in ’98?” It’s a fair question. My friend Buster has written several times that we should have done a better job, should have Rosenthal quoteat least written general stories on the subject. Perhaps, but my counter to that is that editors would have wanted names, not some general analysis. And journalistically, that was not viable.
In my opinion, most of us were not nearly as educated on the topic as perhaps we should have been, and that’s another reason why the reporting—during that period—was weak. It later got much, much better. If not for the work of some great journalists – Verducci, Lance Williams and Mark Fainaru-Wada of the San Francisco Chronicle, T.J. Quinn of the New York Daily News – we would not know nearly as much as we do today.
At the same time, it astounds and troubles me that some journalists now speculate in print about potential users in a way that would have been frowned upon only a few years ago. I think it’s wrong. I’m bothered by the many leaks of confidential information – the BALCO grand-jury testimony, Bonds’ positive test for amphetamines. It reeks of McCarthyism. Of course, as journalists, Lance and Mark did exactly what they were supposed to do; leaking grand-jury testimony is against the law, printing the information is not.
BizBall: This year’s Hall of Fame voting is in the books, and unsurprisingly, McGwire didn’t get enough votes. You, like many others, wrote of why you wouldn’t be voting for him, and you made it clear that you won’t be voting for any suspected steroid users on the first ballot. My question is this… Has the specter of steroids in baseball created a level of undue suspicion in MLB? Has it created an environment in which any player that is homerun prodigious is now “suspected of steroid use”?
Rosenthal: The answer is yes, and I’m not happy about it; it’s as if the pendulum has swung too far the other way. People ask all the time, “Where were you guys” – meaning reporters – “in ’98?” It’s a fair question. My friend Buster has written several times that we should have done a better job, should have Rosenthal quoteat least written general stories on the subject. Perhaps, but my counter to that is that editors would have wanted names, not some general analysis. And journalistically, that was not viable.
In my opinion, most of us were not nearly as educated on the topic as perhaps we should have been, and that’s another reason why the reporting—during that period—was weak. It later got much, much better. If not for the work of some great journalists – Verducci, Lance Williams and Mark Fainaru-Wada of the San Francisco Chronicle, T.J. Quinn of the New York Daily News – we would not know nearly as much as we do today.
At the same time, it astounds and troubles me that some journalists now speculate in print about potential users in a way that would have been frowned upon only a few years ago. I think it’s wrong. I’m bothered by the many leaks of confidential information – the BALCO grand-jury testimony, Bonds’ positive test for amphetamines. It reeks of McCarthyism. Of course, as journalists, Lance and Mark did exactly what they were supposed to do; leaking grand-jury testimony is against the law, printing the information is not.