NO APOLOGIES: White Sox fans (inset bottom left) and former teammate Johnny Damon (inset top left) may question the 2009 Yankees’ achievements because of Alex Rodriguez, but The Post’s Ken Davidoff writes that in the steroid era, the results are pure. (N.Y. Post: Charles Wenzelberg (3))
CHICAGO — On the day Alex Rodriguez formally appealed his 211-game suspension, preserving his present as an active player and signing onto a future as a defendant, a voice from the past emerged to cast doubt on what really happened not long ago.
“I really haven’t sat down and thought that far, but if that’s how he was able to hit in the postseason, then yeah, absolutely,” Johnny Damon told MLB Network Radio.
You need only to have paid modest attention to the events of the past week to guess correctly that Damon was answering this question: Is the Yankees’ 2009 World Series title diminished if it turns out A-Rod was using illegal performance-enhancing drugs at the time?
“I haven’t even seen it,” Rodriguez said of Damon’s comments yesterday, before he went 1-for-5 with a strikeout and walk in the Yankees’ 6-5 loss to the White Sox in 12 innings at U.S. Cellular Field. “I love Johnny. I talk to Johnny all the time.”
Damon is a great guy, highly agreeable to hypotheses like this one. This one, though, he should have challenged. He sort of did, in this very interview — “Then you start going and saying was anyone [else] on their team cheating?” — and again shortly after when I spoke with him in a telephone conversation.
The A-Rod appeal hearing will impact plenty, from the beleaguered third baseman’s earnings to the Yankees’ financial flexibility to Bud Selig’s legacy. What it absolutely won’t impact is the legitimacy of the Yankees’ 2009 championship.
Statistics are statistics in the sports world, and results are results. Nothing we learn ex post facto is going to change that reality. Rather, every number has a story behind it, and you understand an imperfect game played by an imperfect species is going to be replete with imperfections.
Just for the heck of it: The 2009 Phillies used lefty reliever Antonio Bastardo in their National League Division Series and NL Championship Series. Bastardo is one of the 12 players who accepted 50-game suspensions Monday for their involvement in the now-shuttered Biogenesis anti-aging clinic in South Florida.
In a statement, Bastardo acknowledged “significant errors in judgment during the 2012 season”; right now, we know only that MLB is alleging that A-Rod used illegal PEDs for “multiple years.” So it could turn out neither man was juicing during the ’09 Fall Classic. But at times like these, we find plenty of folks prioritizing sanctimony over specifics.
So we have people wondering which players and teams were “clean” and which weren’t, and nice guys like Damon getting reeled into this fruitless endeavor.
“I’m glad I was able to win a championship in New York,” Damon said. “The whole era is a bad subject.”
Eh. It seems bad because the illegal PEDs get increasingly effective. But players in the 1970s broke the law by using amphetamines to help their games, and far worse, players in the early 20th century consorted with gamblers. We’ll never know which of the numbers are skewed because players perhaps weren’t invested in helping their own club win.
And don’t even get us started on owners behaving badly. The segregation prior to 1947 created an easier playing field for white ballplayers, which impacts the statistics. The guys who ran teams in the 1980s were found guilty of colluding to keep salaries down. They were doing the opposite of acting on behalf of their fans.
Therefore, if we learn through the appeal hearing that MLB in fact has evidence A-Rod used illegal PEDs during his memorable, fantastic 2009 postseason? It won’t mean a darn thing about the validity of the ’09 World Series victory.
I asked Damon if he thought that perhaps some of his 2004 Red Sox teammates also were using illegal PEDs. Agreeable once more, he said, “That’s why you can’t go back and take awards away. You’ll find out someone else was doing something.”
“There’s always going to be speculation about other teams that have won World Series, whether a player was on it or not, how much a club benefited from it,” Yankees manager Joe Girardi said. “So I don’t really get too caught up in that.”
It’s in his best interests not to get caught up in that; he managed the ’09 Yankees, too. Yet Girardi is right. To get caught up in this sort of unnavigable riddle is to waste one’s brain cells with little gain at the front end.
Yankees fans should feel no shame over what their team did four years ago, or over how much A-Rod contributed. In a sports world where we’ll never get the answers to all of our questions about these athletes and their “cleanliness,” the results are all you have.