well, in 1988, steroids weren't even illegal. and they weren't banned by mlb, either. so greenwell's remark is just plain stupid.

you can't take away someone's award for doing something that wasn't aginst the rules or even the law.

No? Baseball does it often.

Roger Maris... punished for playing more games than Ruth... in keeping with the rules. It took years to fix that mistake and give him his full reward.

Chicago Cubs, 1984 (I think)... had the better record, should have had a home game in game 5 of the LCS. The game was played in San Diego because MLB wanted a night game. Cubs got punished for not breaking any baseball rule or baseball law. Padres won the series, and Cubs fans still curse MLB for taking away their reward of home field advantage in the LCS.

The lesson being, when it suits MLB, they have absolutely no qualms whatsoever about lessening or eliminating any honor, any reward, or any recognition to any player. If enough pressure amounts on MLB to revoke the MVP, or grant a ex-post-facto co-MVP, they'll do it. To save face, to make more money, to try to look more anti-steriods... they'll do it and never think twice. They will probably fail to understand any protest raised by fanbase.

It may not be right that MLB would do such a thing. It wasn't right to force the Cubs on the road for a home playoff game they had earned. MLB did so anyway and never showed any slightest concern over the ethics of the move. We can expect similar treatment with regards to steroids.

It may not be right, but they most certainly can do such a thing. They have already laid all the precedent they need to arbitrarily rewrite the rule book whenever a need calls. And they have already proven they care more about sucking up as much money as fast as possible than protecting the game, the players, or the fans from something as potentially devastating as steroids. If baseball would knowingly allow players to juice up for a decade, I really don't see them being bothered by a little thing such as changing who won some piddly little award.

We are going to see a lot of players like Mike Greenwell who rightfully question players like Canseco who may not have broken any existing rules but they did create an unlevel playing field by taking muscle enhancers. Seems like a lot of the alleged steroid users somehow wound up with the MVP award in their league.

You don't hear it mentioned much but Roger Maris didn't hit his first home till his 11th game so he in effect hit his 61 home runs in 151 games according to the baseball-almanc.com site under fabulous feats.

Shoot, lets revisit Bond's last three MVPs. And now that it appears that Kirby wasn't such a saint, we can't give him the MVP. And what about Andre Dawson's MVP award? Or Palmerio's (I think) Gold Glove for playing frickin' 28 games at first! And on and on and on. Feh. What's done is done, let's move on, there's (I hope) a steroid free season coming up.

Speaking of Retroactive MVP, how about in 2000 when Jason "Juice" Giambi beat out Frank Thomas for MVP. Would not a third MVP award for the Big Hurt solidified him as a sure fire Hall of Famer?

Factual note: Wasn't game five supposed to be in San Diego? Correct me if I am wrong but I believe that MLB was still using the 2-3 format, and as such the game was scheduled to take place there. Back then MLB did not reward home field advantage to the team with the best record, but instead utilized a rotating system between east and west.

The difference between the Cubs and Maris examples are that those were prospective decisions that MLB made. Absurd or not, it's not like they awarded Maris the single season home run record, and then changed their mind 10 years later.

Preserving Canseco's MVP (or Giambi's or Caminiti's for that matter) is not just about what's done is done, or just about obeying the rules; it's about preserving objectivity in the record books. If we strip Canseco of his MVP for steroid use, how do we treat Babe Ruth's records for playing in a segregated era? If Josh Gibson and any of the black players in the Negro leagues were allowed into MLB back then I'm sure Ruth would still have been great, but as great? I don't know, and neither does anyone else for that matter. So we live his stats as is, and leave it to historians to debate the impact of segregation on Ruth's achievements.

I think we should be doing same thing with steroid usage in the modern era. Not only do we not know who's using, we don't know what they're using, how often they're using, or what kind of advantage steroids represent. To just make a blanket statement that Canseco or any alleged steroid user didn't earn his achievement is opening the door to subjective judgments that we're just not qualified to make at this time.

The Ruth analogy isn't a good one for this reason - his peers were equal under the rules. You can't say that you'll take away Ruth's home run crown of 1927 and award it to another player, because that other player didn't play against the top Negro League players, either.

Canseco, on the other hand, used a performance-enhancing drug, while Mike Greenwell (says he) did not. I'm not saying that Greenwell's right but that the argument against it using Ruth and Negro Leaguers doesn't hold.

Larry

Not to mention that for a player like Thomas, who lost the MVp to a player using illegal substances (unlike the Greenwell situation, where it was not illegal at the time), that represented a significant loss of income, since Thomas had an app. $500,000 MVP bonus in his contract back then. If anyone deserves a retroactive MVP, it's Thomas, who's clearly the best non-steroid hitter of the last 10-15 years.