Review: "Game of Shadows"

Allow me to make a small (possibly horrible) analogy.  Last night, as I painfully turned away from the rain delay induced Rob Schneider-fest, I caught part of "The Godfather".  It would be refreshing if Selig took the lead of Vito Corleone and called all the heads of the family... errr... owners, and set things straight.  Let the past be the past.  Admit publicly that because of the lack of league supervision, performance enhancing drugs went unchecked, and thus affected the game we love.  The extent of that affect is irrelevant.  It can not be undone, and the ramifications of this investigation could really taint the last 15 to 20 years of baseball.  I think it is fair to assume that we all were aware of some kind of abuse... be it steroids or "greenies" or whatever.  The game has become popular again, but I fel this investigation will set it back.  Selig is often viewed as a buffoon... President Logan of 24, if you will.  If he were to stand up, take the heat, I think he would be more respected and thus known for cleaning up a mess he helped perpetuate.

I have mixed feelings about Buster Olney, but I totally agree with his recent blog entries about the subject:

When the dust settles, when baseball's belated investigation into steroid use ends, I bet Bud Selig is going to wish he had taken a different course of action.

He'll wish he had simply said, of the rise of steroids: We blew it. I blew it. The institution of baseball blew it. I didn't ask the right questions at the right time, and the steroid genie got out of the bottle, and there's nothing we can do to put it back now, to know for sure who was clean and who was dirty in the '90s. All we can do is clean up the sport as best we can, moving forward.

But it's too late for that now, and whatever happens in the months ahead, it's going to be ugly. If the investigation is thorough and credible, dozens (or more) of players and executives will be questioned and implicated for what they did or didn't do, and if the investigation fizzles and comes up with nothing more than Barry Bonds and a handful of other steroid users -- i.e., scapegoats -- the effort will be mocked widely as a sham.

There's a lot more here and here.

And I'll also give Olney a ton of credit for his NY Times editorial (registration required) admitting that he blew it:

I had a role in baseball's institutional failure during what will be forever known as the Steroid Era. But I was only part of the problem, because just about everyone in baseball is to blame: the big league and minor league steroid users; the clean players who said nothing for too long; the players association leaders, Don Fehr and Gene Orza; and, of course, the baseball owners and Commissioner Bud Selig.

That's why it seems farcical that Selig is only now opening an investigation into steroid use -- an investigation prompted by a book, "Game of Shadows," that accuses Barry Bonds of the San Francisco Giants of using steroids.

And that's why it will be doubly farcical if the inquiry, led by George Mitchell, in the end focuses only on Bonds and a handful of other players. It would be like laying all the blame for Iran-contra on Oliver North.

For a steroid investigation to be credible, it would have to look at all of baseball: not just the players, but the league and the union as well. The inquiry would have to determine what Major League Baseball and union officials knew, and when they knew it.

I've said before that I don't necessarily agree with how Fainaru-Wada and Williams got some of their evidence, but now it's out there nonetheless.  As a result we're getting a typical Bud Selig/MLB response - poorly timed and incredibly badly planned.

I wonder if those authors took any caffeine pills to get through this book.
http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/sports/columnists/dan_le_batard/14043754.htm

I'm doing a presentation on why I don't understand the hoopla behind the whole "steroid scandal".  In my research I am reading SI articles in "Great Baseball Writing", and I found several comment on Bonds that were contrary to what is written in game of shadows.  Foremost, about Bonds's attitude...Apparently the 'roids made him an arrogant person.  I guess he's been taking them since highschool according to the 93 article where Bobby states, "hes never liked people".