Blame Selig, Fehr for tainting Piazza’s career
SORRY, Mike Piazza, those of us trained — conditioned — to recognize up from down have no choice but to consider your considerable achievements as drug-enabled, if not drug-explained.
Hey, whether you did or didn’t wouldn’t even be at issue if not for the two most powerful guiding lights and MLB authorities of your time — the chosen commissioner of baseball’s team owners, Bud Selig, and the head of your MLBPA union, Donald Fehr.
It was their greed-driven choice to ignore the impossible-tomiss Steroid Era that sold sluggers to the public, sponsors and partner TV networks.
They sold steroid sluggers at a premium so both the owners and players could get rich on dirty money and in the foolish, money-first belief that their conspiracy of neglect would and could withstand the obvious emergence of muscle-massed, swollen-head supermen doing at 35 and older what they couldn’t come close to at 27.
Selig, Fehr and their constituents — not fans — made chumps of the clean players, made it incumbent upon them to inject or ingest PEDs lest they never get a shot at the big time and the big money. They’re the ones who made chumps of those greats — Babe Ruth, Hank Aaron, Lou Gehrig, Willie Mays, to name four — who achieved what they did on the clean and natural.
It wasn’t us who determined for you and scores of other overnight sluggers that you’re guilty un- til proven innocent; it wasn’t us who made your record for most HRs by a catcher highly suspect within seasons lousy with the drug-dependent. That was the foresight-forsaken work of Selig and those he answered to, and Fehr and those he represented. It never dawned on them that it would become a Jericho?
Guilty until proven innocent, Mike. Take it up with Selig and Fehr. I’m just playing the hand they dealt both of us.