Hall of Fame legend Carlton Fisk came out swinging today in the Chicago Tribune against the steroid era in baseball, specifically the chemically enhanced gorilla in St. Louis.
Good ‘ol Pudge pulls no punches when discussing his own knowledge and opinions of the users.
“I didn’t just find this out,” Fisk told the Tribune Tuesday from Florida. “I worked hard in the gym to look like I did and feel like I felt. (Catching) took a toll on me, too. A lot of people knew. Nobody wanted to really address the issue.
“But when you have some of these obscene numbers being put up by people who shouldn’t even be there. … I mean, you know what’s going on. … The people it should have been most obvious to are the people who covered it up by not addressing it.”
While he doesn’t name a name in that last sentence, I think it can be inferred he’s talking about his former manager Tony La Russa.
He also defends ‘clean’ players, like himself, for not blowing the whistle sooner.
“You don’t blame people for not ratting them out; you blame the people who abused the pharmaceutical world,” Fisk said. “It’s not like you are taking a couple of aspirin and you don’t know what’s going on. (Non-prescription steroid use has been) a federal offense for a long time, regardless of whether baseball was recognizing it and putting rules into place. The people who did it … they were breaking the law to start with. It doesn’t have to be a baseball law. They knew what they were doing and the reason they were doing it. Now they are sorry because they are getting called out.”
Fisky nicely lends a little credibility to what I wrote last week, by echoing my sentiments exactly when questioned whether or not steroids actually helped McGwire hit home runs, which the Cardinals hitting coach laughably denies.
“That’s a crock, Fisk said. “There’s a reason they call it performance-enhancing drugs. That’s what it does — performance enhancement. You can be good, but it’s going to make you better. You can be average, but it is going to make you good. If you are below average, it is going to make you average. Some guys who went that route got their five-year, $35 million contracts and now are off into the sunset somewhere. Because once they can’t use (steroids) anymore, they can’t play anymore.”
Regarding Fisk, I remember vividly in 1981 when the White Sox signed 3 huge free-agents in Greg Luzinski, Ron LeFlore and Fisk. It was exciting for a baseball kid like me because, as a Cubs fan, not only had the Cubs never signed any huge free agents, but they had been really, really bad in my lifetime. Suddenly, the Sox were a fun team to watch and I was jealous that my team well, wasn’t. The early 80’s were a rough time to root root root for the Cubbies. Luckily, I never wavered in my support of my team because as we all know, in polite society, “White Sox fan” is a stigma from which a kid cannot easily recover. But I always had a special place in my heart for Carlton Fisk.
As we started going to games by ourselves in the mid 80’s, Comiskey Park was a cheap (usually free) and easy ticket, plus the beer vendors never ‘carded’, which was, of course, a huge plus. In 1986, a bunch of us went to a Sox game specifically because the genius Hawk Harrelson had moved Pudge to left field, and Fisk hated the move so much, he would come over and chat with us down the left field line between batters. I dare say those close encounters with a guy who was already then a baseball legend, helped form me into the fan I eventually became.
It’s nice to see a guy with the stature of Carlton Fisk finally telling the truth about his feelings on the spurious era. (chicagotribune) Technorati Tags:
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