Starting Pitcher: Edinson Volquez
All of a sudden, Volquez became unhittable upon arriving in Cincy. He made the team out of spring training. In his first nine starts in 2008, he went 7-1 with a 1.33 ERA. He was elected to the All-Star game, and optimistic Reds fans saw a prospect finally reaching his potential. After all, the kid was still just 24. He ended up going 17-6 with a 3.21 ERA on the season, along with 206 strikeouts, showing all the hallmarks of a future ace.
Volquez’s story then took an all-too-familiar twist: a devastating injury the year after a career season. Volquez managed only nine starts in 2009, undergoing season-ending Tommy John surgery in June of that year. In January of 2010, Volquez tested positive for the banned substance and was hit with a 50-game suspension.
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Middle Reliever: Brendan Donnelly
There’s something sort of sad about Brendan Donnelly. “Sad” might not be the right word—as a fan, you understand why.
As a 30-year-old rookie, he had a starring role in an Angels pen that dominated throughout the regular season. Together with veteran closer Troy Percival, Scot Shields, and his bespectacled counterparts, rookie Francisco “K-Rod” Rodriguez and Ben Weber, Donnelly was part of a group that had a collective 2.98 ERA and 1.19 WHIP. Donnelly had a nice little season himself: in 49.2 innings pitched, he only allowed 12 runs—good for a 2.17 ERA—while striking out 54. Pretty impressive for a guy who, only three years before, at the age of 27, had been pitching for the Nashua Pride in the independent Atlantic League.
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Setup Man: John Rocker
If you were assembling a real team, one that had to actually take the field and win games, John Rocker would be the last player you’d want on it. Few ballplayers of the Steroid Era (or any era) were as polarizing as the lefty reliever. Actually, “polarizing” is the wrong word for John Rocker; it implies an equal division of opinions. After a December 1999 Sports Illustrated piece in which he went on a homophobic, racist, and sexist tirade to interviewer Jeff Pearlman, a better word for the erstwhile reliever lies somewhere between “embattled” and “abhorred.”
But we’re not assembling a real team here; we don’t have to worry about clubhouse cohesion or public opinion, and few known steroid users dominated out of the bullpen like John Rocker.
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Closer: Eric Gagne
Eric Gagne broke in with the Dodgers as a starter in 1999. The young pitcher already had a checkered medical history, missing the entire 1997 minor league season for Tommy John surgery. His first three seasons in the majors were unremarkable. He went 11-14 with a 4.61 ERA, while struggling to stay healthy (just 101/151 IP in 2000–2001 after his 30-inning cup of coffee in ’99). To all observers, it seemed Eric Gagne lacked the durability to pitch in the major leagues.
But this was the Steroid Era; injury-plagued pitchers had alternative methods of prolonging their careers.
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The All-Steroids Team:
- C: Todd Hundley
- 1B: Phil Nevin
- 2B: Bret Boone
- SS: Rich Aurilia
- 3B: Ken Caminiti
- OF: Gary Matthews Jr.
- OF: Brady Anderson
- OF: Jay Gibbons
- UTIL: Jay Bell
- DH: David Ortiz
- SP: Edinson Volquez
- MRP: Brendan Donnelly
- SU: John Rocker
- CL: Eric Gagne
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—Photo Andres Rueda/Flickr
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Vocalyze
Great stuff, folks. But while I know you were pressed for space & couldn’t include *everyone*, I’m a little agitated that I was left out. Gibbons & Matthews Jr. couldn’t carry my jockstrap full of filthy syringes. I’m also agitated because I just woke up pantsless under the Liberty Bell. Again.
Sincerely,
Lenny Dykstra
Dear Lenny Dykstra, Quit whining. You got your cash. Not our fault if you pissed it all away on pyramid schemes, you sawed-off, drunken halfwit.
Best,
David Segui
Dear Lenny Dykstra & David Segui, At least you two cocktards leveraged your juicing into lucrative, multi-year deals at all! I’m working at a fucking Quizno’s in Hoboken. Awesome.
Kindly suck it,
Paul Lo Duca
Dear Lenny Dykstra, David Segui & Paul Lo Duca, Yo, can any of you help me get a job at Quizno’s?
Later,
Ozzie Canseco
Dear Moral Police,
Get a freaking life…I have much more to say about this, but ignorant blame-casters such as yourselves probably aren’t too interested in hearing it. If you’d like to have a reasonable debate, feel free to e-mail me at bengm225@gmail.com.
Guy, obviously you didn’t read past the title of the article, they’re defending these players as products of their time
“The ones who blew it for everyone else…couldn’t live with merely being great…players who had no business being in the league, etc.” That sounds like passing judgment to me, not much of a defense. And yes, there is some justification in the intro for why these guys did what they did, but casting blame instead of facts, especially for some guys who never tested positive, is the kind of ignorant observation bias that kept Jeff Bagwell out of the HOF this year.
Big Danny Burns is taking fukin steroids and goes into roid rage once a month when he has his
period!!!
SS should be Miguel Tejada or A-Rod.
Brady Anderson is the TRUE schmuck here (actually, the shlemazel). He again gets lumped in by authors who do little more than look at one career stats column and they think they have their big “AHA!!”, to prove their groundless suspicions. And we all buy into it. I am NOT saying Anderson would have hit that many homers per season commonly, but if the author would just do a bit of easy digging, he would see there were valid reasons he DIDN’T hit that many in any other season. (for example, the prior year was 1994!! then after he hit 50, he played the entire next season with a broken rib. THEN he had a CAREER season at the plate after that, but he was simply no longer a homerun hitter!) And as far as NO RESEARCH goes, why doesn’t the author note that Brady was also inseparable best friends (then and still today) with that other guy who hit ALOT more homers LATER in his career than early on, during that SAME period….a man who’s not exactly a bastion of “steroid suspicion”, CAL RIPKEN, JR??? My point is, it’s clear the author didn’t do his homework. HIs article is just pap to fuel our sad national controversy.