We're Getting No Where

Randy Johnson won his 300th game last year. Was it legit?

From Sports Illustrated – “Johnson says in those years [the Mitchell Report] he hired a professor from Canada to educate him on nutrition and training. He says that he used a hyperbaric chamber to improve recovery time and ‘dabbled in all kinds of powders and tried to put weight on.’ When asked what would have stopped him from using steroids at a time when baseball did not specifically ban them, Johnson pauses, then says, ‘Because I wasn’t searching for anything other than to have the ability to throw the ball over the plate. You can do your homework. I’ve always thrown as hard as anybody in the game. There’s no deying that. I’ve [also] always been skinny. I’m not denying that I went to GNC and all that stuff. I took a lot of different things that, you know, maybe at that time, maybe early enough, if I would have been tested, who knows? I could have been taking stuff had they tested me back then. Maybe I would have tested [positive for a banned supplement]. I don’t know.

Johnson is asked if he could assure his fans that his achievements have been legitimate, because even clean players can be wrongly suspected. ‘You’ve got to [ask] what you’ve got to [ask], I guess,’ Johnson says, before adding, ‘How long have we been doing drug tests now?’

Told testing began with anonymous survey tests in 2003, he replies, ‘Okay, what’s that? Six years now? I’m 45 . . . 39 to the present and I’ve passed every test and I’ve still had some pretty good years.’”

Boy this sounds like a complete non-denial denial. Typically offensive players have been eyed more often than pitchers when it comes to HGH or steroids. Sure Clemens is at the top of the list and you had your JC Romero suspended for 50 games. But pitchers usually get a pass when the talk of PEDs comes up.

When the article was published in SI last year I didn’t hear one sportscaster locally, on ESPN, MLB Channel or anywhere talk about it. But if you read the words, Johnson is talking his way around the truth.

We haven’t come any further than 1998. Other than high profile players being shunned (Clemens, Sosa, McGwire, Bonds) no one is looking for problems currently.
This season (at least in the NL) a lot of a-typical batters are leading categories. Corey Hart, Scott Rolen and Troy Glaus are among the leaders in home runs. Kelly Johnson had nine homeruns in April. Perhaps there was a joking “What’s he taking?” but otherwise it’s the dewy “My goodness he’s off to a good start” or “good to see (Glaus, Rolen) is having a rebound year.” Announcers and reporters alike seem to have fallen back into that blind-eyed mode of assuming an abnormal year or an incredible rebound year is just one of those things.