Giambi Reflects

I'm not a big fan of Jason Giambi, but I thought what he said about his steriod use today was maybe as open as I've seen a current major league baseball player who used steriods say about them in the game.

"I was wrong for doing that stuff. What we should have done a long time ago was stand up -- players, ownership, everybody -- and said, 'We made a mistake.' We should have apologized back then and made sure we had a rule in place and gone forward. Steroids and all of that was a part of history. But it was a topic that everybody wanted to avoid. Nobody wanted to talk about it. " -- Jason Giambi, DH New York Yankees

I really don't want to get to deep into my thoughts on steriods here in this post, but it's a good thing to see Giambi, a former MVP award winner, reflect about baseball's dark side more competently. I think his statement can be viewed as him blaming everyone in baseball and him getting caught up in steroids, but I also agree everyone involved in the game just let steriods and performance enhancers be accepted as part of the culture of the game (we all see how anyone could have been involved as with that former Mets clubhouse staff person who distributed the juice). Everything going on from Canseco's book to the Mitchell Panel investigation are just scratching the surface on what happened and continues to go on. And honestly, we'll ever know the whole story.

However, Giambi took the equivalent of the Mark McGwire way out of not talking about the past when asked why he took steriods saying, "Maybe one day I'll talk about it, but not now." And perhaps, and I seriously wonder this, McGwire had something to do with Giambi's useage since they played together 1995-1997.

But this may be as good a statement as you can get from a former user on the sad state of affairs in the game. Should MLB apologize about steriods? Well, first it needs to rid the game of them. Baseball can't apologize when players are still using because it still hasn't cleaned up it's culture.