Ken Griffey Jr. is usually held up as the one slugging superstar from the 90s who did it clean. He may have. We don’t know. Nor do we know that the guys who are accused of it were dirty. But despite all of that uncertainty, there has always been a sense that accusing Griffey of taking PEDs -- if anyone ever dared -- would be a major, major escalation in the PED wars.
Philadelphia Daily News columnist Marcus Hayes escalated last night.
He was in a long Twitter war with Ryan Lawrence of the Philadelphia Daily News about who was better -- Ichiro or Griffey. The entire exchange is play-by-played over at Crossing Broad. Setting aside the fact that only a dunderhead would say that Ichiro was a better overall player than Griffey, Hayes kept couching his argument about Griffey’s decline years as his “post-PED years.” Lawrence let it go a couple of times, maybe incredulous about what he was reading. But he finally called Hayes on it:
Hayes never backed down after that, which leaves him on record as saying that Ken Griffey Jr. was a PED user. Because of “catastrophic dropoff and soft-tissue injuries.” I’ve not gone back and looked but I’m guessing Hayes has also accused people of being on the juice specifically because they never dropped off and stayed healthy even as they aged.
Of course that’s the beauty of a witch hunt. You don’t need actual evidence or even coherence. People are already so riled up that evidence and anti-evidence are one and the same.
Anyway, good to know someone who actually works for a mainstream media outlet is on record accusing Ken Griffey Jr. of juicing. I never thought we’d get there, but here we are.
Note: this post originally identified Hayes as a “Philly.com” columnist. He is not. He is a columnist for the Philadelphia Daily News. Apologies for the error.
