Hasn't it been a hard enough season for the St. Louis Cardinals? Alcohol soaked arrests and death, a career-threatening injury for their ace and an off-year for almost everyone in the lineup has cast a pall over their title defense. Yet through it all they are hanging in the race for the NL Central because of both improved play and the general putridness of the other clubs that share their locale. The face of that grit has been Rick Ankiel's. Infamous for his breakdown on the mound after an encouraging start to his major league career Ankiel rebuilt himself into a power-hitting outfielder. He finally made it back to the major leagues, homered in his first game and has generated just about the only good news out of the heartland all season.
It continued yesterday when he hit two bombs and drove in seven runs to power the Cardinals' 16-4 win against the Pirates. And then the Daily News went to press and the whole story went to shit.
St. Louis Cardinals outfielder Rick Ankiel, baseball's feel-good story of the season, received a 12-month supply of human growth hormone in 2004 from a Florida pharmacy that was part of a national illegal prescription drug-distribution operation, the Daily News has learned.
It's hard not to be sympathetic to Ankiel. In 2004 he was searching for some way to keep doing the only thing he knew how to do. HGH wasn't against baseball's rules at the time and we know that he's not the only player who went that route to gain a leg up. And it was 2004 which doesn't mean that he's still using HGH or any other performance enhancing drugs right now so it doesn't necessarily negate what he's done since returning to the Show.
But all of that is a big, juicy rationalization. Ankiel is now covered in the same cloud that envelops Barry Bonds, Mark McGwire and nearly every other prodigious home run hitter of the last decade. It makes the feel-good story of the 2007 season fugazy and further erodes the trust and belief we can have in athletes doing amazing things because of their natural ability. As Will Leitch, Deadspin editor and perhaps the world's biggest Ankiel fan, put it this morning,
Fourteen hours ago, Rick Ankiel was what we loved about sports: His story existed in the black-white world we demand of our sports. His story was pure; it was impossible not to be happy for him.
But as much as we try to make it not so -- and boy, do we try -- the sports world is gray. Ankiel is not a monster or The Bad Guy now that we know he accepted HGH in 2004. But he's not the Guy In The White Hat Here To Save Our Games we all believed -- needed to believe-- he was either. His story is a human one. His story is gray. It always was.
Maybe it is unfair to put that White Hat on any one athlete. How many O.J.'s, Vicks, Barrys and, yes, Ankiels do we need to understand once and for all that there are, at the very least, two sides to every story? In the end I think it says something good about American fans that they have a belief in the better nature of our sporting angels. That doesn't make it any easier to find out something dark about one of these idols, it just means that like anyone who has true faith they believe in the face of evidence to the contrary. Does that make us gullible or stupid? Perhaps but faith isn't something rational or there would be no faithful anywhere in the world. It would be nice if the faithful weren't always the ones taking a beating, though.
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