Why I Hope Derek Jeter Gets Busted for PEDs

I hope Derek Jeter gets busted for PEDs. Yesterday, a report in the New York Times cautiously linked Derek Jeter's name to the other names listed in Al Jazeera's documentary report on doping in sports. Among the other names in the documentary were baseball players Ryan Howard and Ryan Zimmerman, as well as NFL legend Peyton Manning, the biggest, most shocking name in the report. Everyone named in the documentary worked with a trainer in Florida named Jason Riley, who started a company with Al Jazeera's main source, Charlie Sly. As the Times noted, Jeter also worked with Riley. As I should note, Sly has since recanted his entire (pretty convincing!) story.

To be clear: that is the sum total of the connection with Derek Jeter and PEDs. It is the "a friend of a friend of friend told me" of connections. Still, I hope it's true.

The sports world took notice, but barely flinched, when Peyton Manning's name was revealed in the documentary. Part of that was the flimsy evidence—HGH was allegedly sent to his home in his wife's name multiple times, but nothing connected Manning directly to PED use—part of it, simply, was that no one gives a shit about PEDs in football. Once you've decided not to care about the game destroying the brains of the people who play it, HGH's side effects barely warrant a shrug. Jim Nantz flat out refused to talk about the allegations during a Broncos game on Sunday and the story barely registered as anything of note.

But baseball… well, just look around the internet today. The Hall of Fame will announce it's newest induction class and yet again no-doubters like Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens will be left on the outside looking in, entirely because of PED allegations against them; deserving candidates like Mike Piazza and Jeff Bagwell lose votes because of suspicions regarding PEDs that never even rose to the level of allegation. Baseball writers, and to a shrinking extent, baseball fans are psychotic about PED use. So what happens when the Golden Boy gets popped for PEDs?

I love Jeets. I'm a Yankees fan and he was part of, and then leader of, some of the greatest teams I've ever been lucky enough to watch. This isn't about tarnishing his legacy, or smearing his name, or anything like that, because as far as I'm concerned his legacy can't be tarnished. I watched him play shortstop for the New York Yankees for 20 years, win five World Series, and treat the media with the contempt they deserved without them even realizing it. From a seat along the first baseline, I watched him hit a home run for his 3,000th career hit. I watched him, from the upper deck along the third base line, hit his only career grand slam. That is a baseball player's legacy. Everything else is just fancy prose.

Jeter getting popped for using HGH or something else won't ruin anything for me. I've long since recovered from the initial shock of the McGwire/Sosa era and moved on. Maybe I was fortunate to be at an age where I could still learn new tricks unlike, say, the voting members of the BBWAA, but I've made peace with it. I simply don't care anymore, and I just want to see great players play as long and as well as they can. Records will stand long after we all die, but also we'll all be dead, so who cares about their sanctity? Why am I going to lose sleep over what stranger gets credit for hitting the most home runs? Just hit them, that's all I care about.

So, I'm not hopeful because I hate Jeter, or the Yankees. I'm hopeful because I want to see how the self-serving and self-preserving phonies in the BBWAA will react to a scenario that reveals Derek Jeter—THE CAPTAIN—to be no better than Lance Armstrong, Barry Bonds, and yes, Alex Rodriguez. How will this moralizing band of grumps react to their precious icon being a cheat? Will they turn on him, or will they find a way to excuse it or disbelieve it?

The Jeter connection to this story is actually very familiar. It goes back to when he was struggling to keep up as he entered his mid-thirties. Jeter fought off decline, for a while, after pairing up with a new trainer who changed everything for him. He worked his ass off to get back to where he once was. New Training regimen, renewed focus, the quest for a fifth ring, the whole bit. We know this because at the time, writers were writing these stories about Jeter, and buying into all of it. I would love to see how baseball writers, for the millionth time, react to being made fools for good copy.

They built McGwire and Sosa and everyone else into idols, and when it turned out they were dirty cheats they unleashed hell on all of them. This backlash, which has as much to do with embarrassed sportswriters as it does tarnished ethics, influenced fan opinions and still justifies these writers intentionally keeping the players that embarrassed them out of the Hall of Fame. I want to see what happens if it's Jeter next.

Will it be just another case of tearing down what they spent 20 years building up? Because here's the thing: the BBWAA is not the gatekeeper to the game. Baseball, like any other sport, transcends the hacks who write about it. The game is whatever it is, to whomever bothers to care about it. My hope is that it forces at least one more writer to question whether any of this even matters anymore. It's slowly happening, but I hope it's Jeter—who never said a single worthwhile thing while talking about baseball, very much by design—who provides the turning point in how we talk about baseball. Keep it clean, by all means, but do we need to keep vilifying these people for doing exactly what we want them to do?