Up until today dealing with the steriod problem in baseball was easy for Red Sox fans. No players on Boston's roster came out in the Mitchell report, none of them have been accused of anything by Canseco, none of them have been suspended. It was easy to bash A-Rod and Giambi and dismiss Barry Bond's home run records and we all loved shitting all over Roger Clemens who looked done when he left Boston and then all of a sudden started throwing well in Toronto, Houston and NY and hung around for another eleven years.
The 2004 and 2007 Red Sox were free of steriod users, no asteriks for our title teams. But now with Manny's suspension we're all inclined to bash him and laugh at him because he left Boston on bad terms. Which he did, but before that he was part of one of the best 3-4 combos in the history of baseball and won two World Series titles. He ended the curse, he allowed grown men to declare they could now die in peace because they had seen the Red Sox win a World Series.
How do you feel now about those teams? The same? Even though they may have had a cheater? I read a lot of facebook status updates that were very anti-Manny because he got caught with what looks like a drug that helps come off a steriod cycle. But be careful to be happy about this because if we find out more and he has been doing this for a longtime it could tarnish or perhaps even ruin his legacy and in turn cast a shadow on the magic of 2004.
Personally, I am not happy about this at all. At the least he did something stupid this spring and it's no big deal. At the worst he's been a cheater for years including when he was with Boston. I loved Manny when he was with Boston, we all did, he delivered at the plate time after time after time. And he delivered when it mattered, late in games, the postseason and so on. He meant so much to Boston, the Red Sox and his teammates it would be devastating to find out he was a cheater. He was often looked at as one of the guys that definately was not a cheater. He was just a natural born hit machine. Now all that he's done and all that was accomplished by the team I've followed my whole life is in question. It's been easy to be a Red Sox fan since 2004, this could change all of that. I was ready to jump off a ledge after Boone in 2003 but along came Keith Foulke and Curt Schilling who teamed with Manny, Papi, Pedro and Millar to finally deliver for Boston. How much all of this is now tainted remains to be seen.
I hope that Manny has answers for our concerns. For now I'm giving him the benefit of a doubt and hoping this turns out to nothing more than an isolated mistake. You should too.
And back to the Yankees, for those of you obsessed with the rivalry(not me) just stick to hating them because they wear pinstripes, not because some of them did steriods because you could be putting your foot in your mouth. There are plenty of reasons to hate A-Rod besides his use of steriods.
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