Schmidt on steroids
It was a topic Mike Schmidt didn't seemed to be thrilled about discussing Saturday morning at the West Manchester Mall, if only because he has been asked about it so often recently.
But I felt I would be remiss as a reporter if I didn't ask Schmidt, who hit 548 home runs during his career and was elected to the Hall of Fame in 1995, if he was bothered at all by the alleged steroid use of several players who are putting up similar career numbers to his. Schmidt said he wasn't bothered by it.
"Not much bothers me any more," Schmidt said. "I've been asked this question so many times and spoken about it so many times and wrote a book about it. It's just the growing pains that a sport goes through. A sign of the times. It's the generation that just passed through baseball. There is still a carry over from that generation in the sport, but I think the sport has nearly totally cleaned up of steroids and substance abuse."
Schmidt paused briefly before discussing the most recent period in baseball history as just another era in the game, like the Dead Ball Era in the early 20th century.
"My opinion is it's up to the fans to look at the era," Schmidt said. "As time goes on, fans will chalk this up to as being the Steroid Era. It's about a 10-year period, like the Dead Ball Era, the Low Mound Era, the World War II-Era. There's probably more if I had time to think about it. There's always something that's going to affect professional sports. They'll be something down the road that comes up and the players will figure out how to beat the system in some way. Who knows what lies ahead in the future? But there will always be things affecting sports that will affect record books. It's up to fans just to understand that it's part of life. We're not going to change it."
Schmidt then went on to talk about Alex Rodriguez, who will likely pass him on the career home run list in the next year or two.
"A-Rod, and I'm not saying that A-Rod has abused anything in his career, but I don't have a problem with A-Rod shooting right by my in the home-run rankings," Schmidt said. "A-Rod has nothing to do with it. He signed a baseball contract, put a uniform on and started playing. He didn't design the stadiums, he doesn't have anything to do with the people that make baseballs and how hard they are. He has nothing to do with bat regulations. He has nothing to do with the rules governing pitching inside. He's just a player. If you let him wear a big arm pad and tell pitchers they can't pitch inside, hitters are going to take over the game, which they've done."
