Beautiful thing about Charlie Pierce is the man doesn’t mince words. Here is his take on a recent piece about Bernie Carbo:

Seriously, illegal amphetamines were being handed out by untrained team staff, without the faintest notion of informed consent, to rookies on behalf of the clubs themselves. Major-league baseball was pushing speed, and lying to the people to whom it was pushing it. This is precisely the way the dealers in the early years got the crack epidemic up and running. No wonder Carbo got hooked.

(And don’t even start with the argument about what “performance-enhancing” really means. Giving you speed while telling you that it was vitamin pills, and doing so clearly in the hope of making you play better, means that the trainer — and through him, the club — is trying to enhance your performance. Period. Unless words mean nothing at all, the debate is all useless semantics, except that I suspect more of the guys who juiced in the 1990’s benefitted from better medical advice than did the guys in the 1970’s who were gobbling speed like it was Jujubes.)

What do we do now? Take these guys out of the Hall of Fame? Obliterate them from the record books? Show up at Old Timer’s Days and boo them? (“AND WHAT ABOUT THE CHILDREN???????????”) Treat, say, Mike Schmidt like Barry Bonds? These guys all took illegal drugs and did so to play better. Unless you define your morality by what sounds best during your spot on Around The Horn, there is no moral difference in the two cases worthy of discussion.