"Everyone cheated back then"

By non sequitur


Not to overdo the whole Manny-testing-positive thing (which I think is a bit overblown), but this piece by Bill Simmons is really good. I usually just find Simmons annoying when he's writing about the Red Sox, but here I think he does a great job of capturing that peculiar moment in baseball history (now gone?) when all the players were using steroids and almost all the fans were pretending not to know (he also convinces me that Ortiz was using). But more than that, I actually think he's really successful in showing what the Red Sox' World Series, especially the 2004 victory, meant and will mean to three generations of Red Sox fans, now that the entire era is tainted (he also made me realize how deep an impression that World Series made on me--despite having been more annoyed by that team than anything else, I found myself feeling something like nostalgia while reading his description). And in doing that, he manages to illustrate the larger social and familial importance of the game. In particular, he actually does a surprisingly good job of conveying the mixture of innocence and skepticism a young fan will have looking back, and the ambivalence and regret a fan who lived through that era will feel about the highs he experienced (I also like the father-son dynamic he conjures up--who knew Bill Simmons could be such an insightful and subtle writer?). I haven't really read that much about the steroid era/"scandal," but this is definitely the best of what I have seen. I'm not really doing it justice; I suggest you just go read it for yourselves.