March 11, 2008
Greenwell Talks About Steroids
Mike Greenwell's wife is a nurse, and she wouldn't let him take steroids:
"The truth?" he said. "My wife's a nurse and basically told me she'd kill me if she caught me doing it. Really. Reality.
"She was a nurse. I looked into it [steroids]. I studied it. I know a lot about steroids, to be honest with you. Because I was very, very tempted as a player to do it and I think there's many, many players out there that were tempted to do it. Probably if I didn't have my wife I would have done it to try to perform at that level. Another little slight reason I retired when I retired. I just didn't feel like it was quite even anymore."
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Posted by David Pinto at
06:00 PM
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Cheating
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Greenwell, playing clean, finished second to Juicin' Canseco in the 1988 AL MVP balloting.
If baseball ever gets around to assigning asterisks to 'roid-era records, that MVP Award ought to be top of the list.
- Jack
Is he still moaning about that '88 MVP ? And Darryl Strawberry should have won over Gibson that year too. If Greenwell's wife was a psychologist maybe she could have helped him get over it.
My favorite player growing up was Mike Greenwell. I just about lost it when I saw this article! Nice work, Pinto! Loving the posts.
If we have advanced from individual players' stats having asterisks to awards having asterisks, when will we do a team asterisk and take away winning playoff shares?
Can the sabremetricians go back and play the steroid era (start with 1985) on their computers with players' stats staying within 1 standard deviation of their mean to see what teams would have won?
Leco, to be clear, Greenwell's not moaning, I am.
- Jack
Hey rmt....lets take it a step further and put asterisks in the Strato-Matic cards of those we suspect juicing up. Imagine if Dave Kingman did steroids...He'd have 600 HRs and still not be in the HOF. Steroids......funny how no one ever mentions Albert Belle.
Laco - or maybe we assume that the Tampa Bay Rays take steroids and the Red Sox and the Yankees don't - and play the 2008 season on-line?
And the strat-o-matic cards for the steroid users fall apart quicker than the other cards....
Not to mention that the doped cards grow about 5% bigger after a couple years. It's the weirdest thing. You suddenly have to go out and buy bigger hard cases for the things if you want to protect them.
And for whatever reason, the text keeps shrinking, and shrinking, and shrinking... It's almost as if they were cards before hitting the printing process after a while!
Hell, since every player who was good just had to have done something, why don't we include everyone since about 1970? I too liked Mike Greenwell and I'm not/wasn't a Red Sox fan. However, the continued adherence to this belief that steroids are/were magic pills is just silly to me. Consider them a "problem" and keep them out of baseball? Fine, perfectly fine. But the evidence (beyond the anecdotal) of users and of steroids effects is not so easily explained.
Well now we know to cross Mike Greenwell off the list of steroid users. If he says he didn't use them, that's good enough for me!