Site Presented By
Wednesday, Nov 25, 2009
It's baseball season. First winning pitcher: Randy Johnson. First home run: Hideki Matsui. First steroid perp: Alex Sanchez? Plus: The Final Four.
Apr 4, 2005 | The baseball season began Sunday night in the Bronx. Commissioner Bud Selig got things started by throwing out the ceremonial first steroid user.
Alex Sanchez of the Tampa Bay Devil Rays was slapped with a 10-day suspension hours before the Red Sox and Yankees took the field at Yankee Stadium for the regular-season opener. Though the one-sentence official announcement didn't mention steroids, as per the agreement with the players, there was no doubt what was behind the suspension, especially after Sanchez announced, "I'm going to fight my case, because I never do any steroids thing, nothing like that."
News of his suspension shocked baseball fans: There's a team in Tampa Bay?
If the lords of Major League Baseball ever sat down and discussed who they'd pick if they could choose the first player to be suspended for steroids, they might just have come up with Alex Sanchez, a small man, a slap-hitter with no power, a marginal player on one of the worst and most-ignored teams in baseball.
The Devil Rays drew 1.2 million fans last year, about the number the Yankees get by Memorial Day. But even those die-hards don't care about Sanchez, who only signed on two weeks ago after being cut by the Tigers, who employed him at the time he was tested in early March.
He's perfect. I'm not saying baseball invented Sanchez, cooked up the results to make him the fall guy. I'm not a believer in conspiracy theories and that would be a level of cunning and evil there's no reason to attach to baseball. I'm just saying if Sanchez didn't exist, baseball would have done well to invent him.
The reaction around baseball showed why. Yankees manager Joe Torre, speaking before the Opening Night game, said the suspension showed "the fact that the testing evidently worked. That's what we all want to find out, that's what even the players want to make sure, that we get the fans' trust back, and that's the only way that can happen."
The sentiment was echoed all over: This shows that the new testing program has teeth. Baseball's public relations problem with steroids is so bad that a player being suspended on Opening Day -- which would be considered a black eye for almost any other sport -- was a kind of victory.
It's a home run for baseball that it gets to show off its new testing teeth without causing a fuss among the fans. People aren't going to be complaining because Alex Sanchez isn't in center field for the Rays on Opening Day. And Sanchez's stature, playing style and anemic .364 lifetime slugging percentage also let baseball make an important point about steroids.
