Some people in the sports media are trying to rewrite baseball history. Plenty have argued that if and when Aaron Judge hits his 62nd home run, he should be recognized as the single season home run champ in Major League Baseball history. It is a point of view Dan Le Batard had no trouble dismissing on Tuesday’s episode of The Dan Patrick Show.
Le Batard, who was dressed as the Mad Hatter for a bit on his own show later in the day, told Patrick that he didn’t need his colleagues that are more nostalgic and romantic for Major League Baseball to try and convince him of what is and isn’t legit.
“For their time, the best player I ever saw was Barry Bonds and I don’t need you to clean that up for me with some of the mythologies of how competitive people might cheat in the margins because they are super competitive about being competitive.”
Barry Bonds hit 73 home runs in 2001. Many assume that was achieved with the help of performance-enhancing drugs.
Dan Le Batard is not so precious about how the record was achieved. He acknowledges that PED use is cheating, but doesn’t dismiss the accomplishments they lead to.
“It’s not that I don’t have a problem with it,” he said. “It’s that I lost my Hall of Fame vote because we were arguing the merits of whether these guys would go through the pharmacy to be competitive when McGwire and Sosa stole the sport from Bonds when they were cheating. He started cheating too and he was better than them when he was cheating. He was better than them when he wasn’t cheating. He was better than anybody I’ve ever seen, Aaron Judge included.”
He zeroed in on the treatment of Bonds specifically, revealing that when he was guest hosting Pardon The Interruption once, ESPN brass was unhappy that he asked why the network was comfortable burying Bonds based on circumstantial evidence, but let Lance Armstrong, who he said had “all this circumstantial evidence and a little more proof,” host the ESPY Awards.
The use of steroids and other performance-enhancing drugs bothers plenty of media members. Dan Le Batard is not one of them. In fact, he wonders why anyone would assume that steroids completely disappeared from American sports after Major League Baseball began testing for them.
“It’s funny to me that we don’t ask any questions of Pujols or Brady or any of these guys or women in their 40s where it’s like ‘how have we cheated science so much that these people have perfected a way to age with grace in sports in a way we wish we all could?’.”
