More Palmeiro

Chris Lynch has some interesting thoughts on the Palmeiro situation.

Palmeiro was caught a while (supposedly back in May) ago but was allowed to appeal the test finding. MLB clearly decided to wait till after the Hall of Fame induction ceremony to suspend Raffy. Why? In small part Bud Selig probably wanted to put this off till after his birthday (he turned 71 on Saturday) but in large part because MLB did not want to take the spotlight off the HoF activities.

I completely agree. And I think it was both the smart thing for baseball to do, and the right thing for baseball to do. The Hall of Fame weekend should be for the Hall of Famers. It would have been disastrous and stupid for MLB to overshadow the ceremonies by releasing the information last week.

I think MLB was also sensitive to who was being inducted and how one of the inductees may have reacted to the news.

Ryne Sandberg was briefly a teammate of Palmeiro and it is well known that Sandberg had marital difficulties. In fact Sandberg skipped the 1995 season in order to try work out the issues with his wife Cindy Sandberg. Many rumors link Cindy Sandberg to some of Ryno's teammates like ... one Rafael Palmeiro.

It it just another coincidence that soon after the rumors of Cindy Sandberg and Rafael Palmeiro popped up that Palmeiro was traded away from the Cubs to the Rangers?

If I had ever heard that, I'd forgotten it. But I doubt that it made much difference. The big thing was to not have the steroid story sucking up "media oxygen" during Hall of Fame weekend.

Maybe I'm reading too much into this but take a look at Sandberg's speech on Sunday:

The reason I am here, they tell me, is that I played the game a certain way, that I played the game the way it was supposed to be played. I don't know about that, but I do know this: I had too much respect for the game to play it any other way... These guys sitting up here [other HoF players] did not pave the way for the rest of us so that players could swing for the fences every time up and forget how to move a runner over to third, it's disrespectful to them, to you, and to the game of baseball that we all played growing up. Respect.... Andre Dawson, the Hawk. No player in baseball history worked harder, suffered more or did it better than Andre Dawson. He's the best I've ever seen. Stand up Hawk. The Hawk. I watched him win MVP for a last place team in 1987 and it was the most unbelievable thing I've ever seen in baseball. He did it the right way, the natural way and he did it in the field and on the bases and in every way, and I hope he will stand up here someday. Respect for the game of baseball. When we all played it, it was mandatory. It's something I hope we will one day see again...

Steroids seemed to be the elephant in the room nobody wanted to talk about. Why else stress that Dawson played "the natural way"?

That's certainly a plausible interpretation. But if it was aimed at former teammates that he knew were using, it seems unlikely that Palmeiro would have been one of them. Palmeiro was still only 23, without having shown much power, when the Cubs traded him to Texas. And didn't Canseco claim to have introduced Palmeiro to steroids? I'm not sure of that, since I haven't read his book - maybe he just claimed to have done them with him, instead of actually introducing him to them. But I doubt that Sandberg, who played with Palmeiro for only 1 full season and parts of 2 more, when Palmeiro was very young and not a power hitter, and who presumably wasn't aware of Palmeiro's upcoming suspension, would actually have been referring to Palmeiro during that section of his speech...