“Every major baseball achievement of the past decade is going to be viewed through the prism of the steroid era, and rightfully so. Baseball commissioner Bud Selig hoped to bring some closure to the performance-enhancement scandal with the George Mitchell investigation but succeeded only in putting some of the gory details on the record. The Mitchell Report simply confirmed what everyone already knew about baseball’s home run explosion but didn’t pretend to be a comprehensive account of the sport’s descent into the steroid abyss…

The steroid era is forever going to be remembered as the steroid era, and everyone who played in it has been burdened with some measure of guilt by association. The well-earned public cynicism about the inflated home run numbers is unfortunate for those who didn’t give in to steroid temptation and those players from earlier eras whose accomplishments have been diminished in comparison…

That’s just the way the baseball world has turned, but we don’t have to like it.”