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Ortiz isn't forgiving Shank
By adamg on Thu, 03/26/2015 - 8:44pm
David Ortiz writes a long piece about the PED accusations and how they haunt him to this day. And, of course, the Globe's own Shank is right in the middle of it all:
In 2013, I came off the DL and started hot. My first 20 games I was hitting like .400. And the reporter with the red jheri curl from The Boston Globe comes into the locker room says, "You're from the Dominican. You're older. You fit the profile of a steroid user. Don’t you think you’re a prime suspect?"
He’s saying this with a straight face. I had taken like 70 at-bats. Anybody can get hot and hit .400 with 70 at-bats. I was stunned. I’m like, I’m Dominican? I fit the profile? Are you kidding me?
I wanted to kill this guy. But you can’t react. That’s what they want. They want you to get angry so they can bury you. So I just smiled at him and asked for his address. ...
The Globe posted a story about the piece titled David Ortiz blasts those who believe he’s a drug cheat that for some reason doesn't mention the Shaughnessy incident.
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Comments
Lace
For years and years I knew people who would passionately defend Lance Armstrong. They'd email articles about how he was being persecuted in the French press, how he was so drug tested as to make it impossible, etc. They took every accusation against Lance personally.
And then for no apparent reason Lance admitted he was doping all along.
I have no idea if Ortiz is clean or not and don't really care. But it's hard to feel sorry for a very highly paid, high profile athlete when they claim they are being unfairly targeted.
eh, not really
Huge numbers of people who regularly followed the sport strongly suspected he was doping. His strongest defender was, primarily himself; he and Lifestrong would viciously attack anyone who accused him of doping, and pulled the cancer card quite often; see, if you said Lance was doping, you weren't just accusing Lance of doping, you were attacking his efforts to "help fight cancer" (which, it turns out, amounted to "raise awareness of cancer", which was nothing more than "sell more Livestrong shit, and employe a couple of people for a phone line.") Few other pros stood up for him, and quite a few were willing to publicly say they thought he was doping.
Mostly when the press wrote anything negative, he or his cohorts would at the very least send a really nasty letter or call them and chew them out. After the Outside article exposed Livestrong, he and his lawyers were FURIOUS.
When you're at the upper part of the sport, where differences in individual performance are small, you just know when someone is operating on a different level.
oh booo hooo hooo
Damn near all of you were doping. Even when your league (which has a government-enforced monopoly, by the way) told you when you all would be tested for doping, dozens of you still failed the tests. And then lot of those people failed the tests again. And that wasn't enough, you had to have hearings and whatnot.
People have a right to be suspicious when, in an sport where virtually every big name has turned out to be a doper, your performance is so much better than everyone else's.
Well, ^ there you have it, folks:
if it weren't for performance enhancing drugs, then every ballplayer would perform at exactly the same level as every other ballplayer!
strawman
"when your performance is so much better than everyone else's."
versus
"exactly the same level as every other ballplayer"
hellooooo strawman argument.
Except one thing
This is about Ortiz, not Rodrigues or Ramirez or anyone else caught using PEDs.
Ortiz spells it out. He goes to the store across from Dunkin Donuts. He's there with accountants buying the same stuff. He isn't going to Mexico or meeting shady people behind closed doors. Moreover, you think he isn't tested all the time, especially in light of the mysterious list from back when taking things was okay and the fact that in the anti-steroids era he has been dominant?
Sure, people can be suspicious, but when CHB, or JCR as he might be called now, assumes based on ethnicity that good performance cannot come from working out and studying pitchers, that does not reflect well even on Shank.
I subscribe to the Globe online
It took me a long time to bite the bullet and do it. I wrestled long and hard with the knowledge that my subscription money would pay for the slightest bit of Dan Shaughnessy's salary and annual totally worthless month-long Florida vacation. But eventually Boston.com got totally unbearable (except Dave Epstein) and Adam can only update local news so many times a day. So enjoy this morning's mimosa on me, Shank.
Get over yourself Papi.
This is Shanks F#%king town!