A lot of good stuff around the web in a busy week for baseball.
Among the Twins named in the Mitchell report, Dan Naulty might be the most sympathetic, in part because he owned up to his mistakes before he was named in the report. LaVelle E. Neal penned an interesting piece on Naulty in Saturday’s Star Tribune.
The other Twins named in the report: Chad Allen, Denny Neagle, Chuck Knoblauch, and Rondell White. Based on the names named, it seems that there are two distinct groups of players. The first is the very good player that wants to become elite (Bonds, Giambi, etc). The second group, the much larger of the two, seems to be made up of borderline players who saw PED’s as their only ticket to the majors.
I’m not sure exactly what the Mitchell report accomplished (except for the inevitable waste of time and taxpayer money that will be the second round of Congressional hearings). I imagine a lot of players are in the same boat as Andy Pettite, who apparently used HGH to recover from an injury before it was banned from baseball.
To me, what the report does prove is that there were enough PED users in baseball that it will be impossible to separate those who used from those who didn’t. For better or worse, the numbers and records put up in baseball during the late 80’s and early 90’s were influenced by player PED use, just as the numbers from 1901-1919 were influenced by the dead ball. My hope that this report will end the silly asterisk debate is probably a dream at this point, but hopefully, as more information comes out, the media feeding frenzy will die down a bit.
The other big news of the past several weeks for Twins fans has been the ongoing trade rumors surrounding Johan Santana. Will Young has been writing a series on a similar situation in recent Twins’ history where a lot of the facts were the same, but the name was Viola instead of Santana. Also, if you haven’t checked out Will’s series on the managerial search of 1986, it is also worth a read.
I’m linking Will a lot here, but he also recently added a retrospective on one of the favorite Twins from my youth who is often forgotten. Not only was he a favorite, but he is a key member of the Twins’ mid-summer run to catch the mighty Oakland A’s in 1988.
Finally, there are still a few question marks to remove in Blake’s attempt to name all of the players in the Roger Patrick painting. If you haven’t given your input make sure to do so here.
Tags: Twins History
