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Green Shoots of Sanity

David Ortiz's terrible, no-good, very bad week might not be so bad for the rest of us. There are indications that the report in the New York Times (based on anonymous sources, natch) that he tested positive for performance-enhancing drugs may have been the tipping point in the Great Drug Witch Hunt/Freakout of the 2000s.

In their halting, legalistic, ass-covering ways, both Major League Baseball and the Major League Baseball Players' Association, a/k/a "the moguls" and "the union," used Ortiz's press conference yesterday to indicate they'd had it with the slow drip of leaks from what was supposed to be a confidential document, and are increasingly willing to let the past remain the past, while they operate under the drug policy of the present.

Excellent. This won't stop the Times or the other Glorious Guardians of Baseball Good from leaking more names and writing/broadcasting more tendentious editorial comments on the meaning of it all, but it moves us all closer to the moment when the response to news of PED use before 2004 is "So what?" and news of PED use in the present is "What a dope Player X must be."

Ortiz's misery may have done his sport a service. I doubt that's much consolation to him. Maybe karma will leave him a line drive or three as a more tangible symbol of approval.

posted by Michael Gee @ 7:16 AM