If you’re wondering what Bobby Valentine, the ex-New York Mets and Texas Rangers manager, has been up to lately. Well, apparently, he’s been pondering the future of performance enhancing drugs in sports.
These are the things, apparently, you spend your time doing after you’ve supposedly invented the wrap sandwich and served as a one-year punchline manager with the Boston Red Sox. Anyhow, our old buddy Bobby V. sat down with Maggie Gray for an installment of Sports Illustrated Now in which he talks about all the merits of PEDs.
[Elsewhere: Madison Bumgarner gets into intense staredown with ump Joe West]
The segment — which you can watch here — starts with Gray asking Valentine if he thinks PEDs will be legal and whether that’s a good thing for sports.
“Probably, if you want to see the best out of your athlete,” Valentine said. “If it’s not harmful to the athlete.”
This, of course, flies in the face of all PED objector logic that says “cheating” is wrong and we want our athletes to play the game clean. Valentine then compares PEDs to weight rooms — in that they started out as a thing baseball teams were against using, but now everybody has ’em. Anybody else look like a shrug emoticon right now or just us? Is that really the best comparison?
Later Valentine — who we probably should add is the director of athletics at Sacred Heart University in Connecticut — would go on to say:
“There’s a lot of really good drugs out there that we do take that make us feel better and perform better, and I think these PEDs that people talk about, that are performance-enhancers, will eventually get into the mainstream.”
[Play a Daily Fantasy contest for cash today!]
Maybe he’s talking about a distant future in which our robot overlords have rid the world of harmful drugs and all steroids or hormones we inject into our body have good consequences. Maybe. And maybe in that future, pizza is healthy, Cyborg Jeffrey Loria is the most beloved owner in baseball and Kanye West is Pope or something.
But if we’re talking about a near future in which baseball — or any other sport — tells its athletes “Eh, just take whatever you want,” we’re going to have to disagree with Valentine that such a day is coming. Drug rules may change over time, sure. But PED anarchy is not on the horizon.
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Mike Oz is the editor of Big League Stew on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at mikeozstew@yahoo.com or follow him on Twitter! Follow @MikeOz
- Sports & Recreation
- Baseball
- Bobby Valentine
- Boston Red Sox
- Maggie Gray
