If Pitchers, Batters Both Cheat, Is It Still Cheating?
From tonight's "60 Minutes": With 354 wins, Roger Clemens is one of the best pitchers in the history of baseball. There's no question about it. But as Mike Wallace reports, there are questions now about whether Roger Clemens cheated to enhance his record and prolong his career.
At a steroid hearing in March 2005, numerous members of the House Committee on Government Reform, led by Chairman Tom Davis, R-Va., denounced performance-enhancing drugs. They offered three arguments: The drugs are illegal, they're harmful, and they're cheating.
Question: If the best pitchers in MLB like Roger Clemens are using performance-enhancing drugs at the same time that the best hitters in baseball like Mark McGwire and Barry Bonds are using performance-enhancing drugs, how can that really be cheating? Wouldn't the enhanced performance of pitchers exactly cancel out the enhanced performance of hitters, with a net effect of zero?
8 Comments:
That is cheating. What did you get when you told your Mom, "All the other kids are doing it."
i have a different purview of the issue clemen----cy
Stephen Jay Gould had a lot to say about baseball statistics that is relevant to this topic. It is a shame that he is not still with us to shed some light on this particular issue...
A net effect of zero would assume that pitchers and batters benefit the same from using steroids. I have a feeling thats not the case...
That the U.S. Congress is spending time holdings hearings on this tells me they have way too much time on their hands.
I don't need to be taxed to pay for this kind of nonsense.
If everyone kills, is it killing? If everyone steals, is it stealing? Of course it is.
If pitchers and batters both used steroids, that doesn't mean everyone did. It just means that whoever did not use steroids was at a double disadvantage. If you were a batter who did not use steroids then your fellow batters who did partake had an unearned higher batting average then you, while the pitchers on steroids you faced had an unearned advantage in suppressing your numbers.
I am endlessly shocked at how little I care about this issue. It is a game, some people take what may be legal drugs to do better. Why should I care?
Perhaps I mean why should the government care?
What's really wacky is unions representing people earning millions of dollars. What's up with that? I thought unions were supposed to help the poor working slobs from big evil business (irony).
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