More history Friday night at the Stadium as Alex Rodriguez smashed a grand slam, continuing his pursuit of the all-time dinger leaders. On the Yankees Entertainment & Sports Network, this grand feat was not put in its proper perspective. YES popped up a “Home Runs, Most of All Time” chart. Michael Kay commented on it.
But he never mentioned that unlike A-Rod, those ahead of him on the list had not hit homers with the aid of performance-enhancing substances.
– Bob Raissman, N.Y. Daily News.
Ahead of A-Rod on the list: Barry Bonds and Sammy Sosa. Also, for what it’s worth, Hank Aaron and Willie Mays.
I’m generally not one to defend Michael Kay, but maybe he had the sense to avoid a topic basically everyone in the world besides newspaper columnists has grown tired of discussing.
As far as I can tell, every single one of A-Rod’s 588 regular-season home runs went over the fence, and every single one counted toward helping his team win.
Unless Major League Baseball someday identifies precisely which home runs were aided by PEDs (and figures out what to do about the ones that came off similarly enhanced pitchers) and strikes them from the record, A-Rod deserves to be listed among the all-time leaders.
And it shouldn’t be Kay’s responsibility to qualify every home run he hits for the rest of his Yankee career. We know what happened. No one’s thrilled about the so-called steroid era, but I’m guessing no one wants to be reminded of it every time a “tainted” but still historically great slugger homers, either.
Tedquarters 
Of course he deserves to be listed among the all-time leaders, but he also deserves to be identified as a cheater. These matters are not mutually exclusive.
I’m also beginning to hate the terms “PED” and “performance enhancing.” Language and words are important, and I get the feeling that these terms have been purposely deployed by baseball’s apologists to mask the reality of steroids, and have now caught on. Why can’t we just say that he used steroids? And nobody knows how great these modern day cheaters really are. For those who deny that steroids help much, just look at Barry Bonds stats b/c we know exactly when he started using from the Game of Shadows. He went from a 37 hr/900+ OPS type player to a 70 hr/1.200 OPS type player, at a point in his career when he should have been getting worse.
I just think in the same way people don’t qualify every Babe Ruth stat with “… but he played in a racist era and never faced blacks/Latinos.”
People watching these games know the circumstances under which the homers were hit. Let them make their own judgments.
Strikes me as disingenuous not to mention A-Rod’s or Bonds’ steroid use when discussing them among the all-time homerun leaders.