OUR VIEW: Shooting stars

Some of the names were shocking. Others were anything but. We all knew about, or suspected, Rafael Palmeiro, Barry Bonds and Jason Giambi. But how many of us had any idea about players like Roger Clemens, Andy Pettitte and Jerry Hairston?
The steroids scandal, already shaking the world of Major League Baseball, will end up shaking the sports world to its core, as well it should. The players who use any banned substances to get an edge, especially in an era where athletes are too well paid for such shenanigans and nutrition science has come so long since the days of Babe Ruth, deserve to have their names marred. They deserve the sure-to-come comparison to the 1919 Black Sox. They deserve the asterisk. The clubs that looked the other way, covered up and glossed over also deserve the asterisk. More than that, they deserve empty seats.
Fans should demand a clean, wholesome sport or else. Even if it means suffering through several seasons of professional soccer before MLB responds, fans should let the powers that be know that they want a national pastime the nation can be proud of.
Unfortunately, the steroids story isn’t just about the failure of Major League Baseball or professional sports, for that matter. It’s also a story about the failure of journalism. These stars, some of them burning among the brightest in the field ever, had been covered from their rookie years on by a team of professional reporters working for respected newspapers.
Those professional journalists saw the same changes the casual fans did and more, after all, they had access to locker rooms, press conferences and other behind the scenes spots. They had to have suspected, as so many casual fans did, that something was awry with some of these players and their ever-expanding heads. Yet they did no investigating. Why? Maybe the reason is the aforementioned access. Perhaps they felt that reporting on illegal drug activity or suspected illegal drug activity would have denied them entrance to those locker rooms, the press boxes and the good quotes that their competitors would surely be getting.
Or maybe something entirely more juvenile caused these professionals to do a disservice to the game and their profession. Just maybe they had stars in their eyes. They might have been blinded by the glory of a Gary Sheffield or a David Justice and thus unwilling to question the changes they saw happening or speak out loud the whispers they’d heard. Star power lends itself to hero worship, as any 12-year-old Little Leaguer will tell you, and hero worship can make even the best of us blind.
We’ll give those professional sportswriters the benefit of the doubt and say that they just wanted to believe that the stars of diamond were somehow, despite all evidence to the contrary, not shooting stars.