Mike Celizic

I guess baseball and sportswriters didn’t get the memo, so let’s repeat it for them: the fans don’t care what Rick Ankiel did three years ago. In fact, they don’t care what he’s doing now as long as he keeps hitting home runs and helping the Cardinals try to defend their World Series title.

They don’t care what anyone’s doing, to be perfectly honest. Oh, the fans around the league are having a lot of fun needling BALCO Barry Bonds about his use of "flaxseed oil," as he put it in that infamous grand jury testimony. But when he tied Hank Aaron and then passed him on the all-time home-run list, they stood up and cheered – even in Los Angeles. But no matter how many times we say baseball’s been mortally wounded, the fact remains that attendance is soaring.

We’ve been flogging the drug thing for years now, and I’ve got news for everyone: the horse we’re beating has been dead so long there’s nothing left but hooves and bones. And if it weren’t for out anal fixation on home runs, even baseball writers wouldn’t bother to lay another lash on it.

As evidence, I give you Rodney Harrison, star defensive back for the New England Patriots. You might have missed it, because it barely slipped our front page when he was suspended for the first four games of this season because of human growth hormone (HGH) use. That’s the same drug The New York Daily News says Ankiel got a year’s supply of three years ago.

Harrison’s suspension was not called a potential "tragedy," as Cardinals G.M. Walt Jocketty told the newspaper the allegations about Ankiel would be if they are true. It wasn’t called anything that I can think of other than an inconvenience to the Patriots, who will miss his services.

I’m having a hard time understanding why Jocketty didn’t ask the obvious

question: "This was three years ago; what’s he doing now?" Then I’d mention that it’s impossible to determine who is using HGH, but if you’re going to invalidate what Ankiel’s done on a suspicion, why aren’t we invalidating every remarkable performance or every other player?

This doesn’t happen in any other sport in baseball, but that’s because baseball is "special" because it has this magic thing called a "home run,"

which is really just a fly ball that travels just far enough to be beyond retrieval by the outfielders. The hit itself isn’t that extraordinary; players have been hitting them by the bushel for almost 90 years now, so quit acting as if it’s such a big deal.

In football, no one called into question the validity of the wins Harrison had contributed to over the years. No one suggested his tackles and interceptions should be stricken from the record books. Not a single writer had a low enough threshold of moral outrage to declare that the very credibility of the NFL was now in question. Not one Congressman demanded an investigation.

So it’s not using drugs that we object to. If it were, the Harrison story would have been headline news on every sports broadcast and all the talk shows would have been discussing nothing else.

The NFL regularly suspends players for steroids and it’s never a big deal, even though we all know that the sport is probably far more dependent on juice of every sort than is baseball. The only time an NFL suspension rose to the level of major news was when Ricky Williams got suspended for a year, and all he was doing was smoking marijuana, which in the view of the commentators was a crime far more hideous than jabbing himself in the butt with a dose of HGH.

I don’t know what Ankiel did, but if he did indeed take delivery of the drugs, I’m going to assume he took them himself and didn’t feed them to the cat. He was in the minor leagues at the time, trying to make the Cardinals as a pitcher. I don’t know if they helped him throw harder, but they sure didn’t help him throw straighter.

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