Lance Berkman Schadenfreudes All Over Brian Cushing
Houston’s 2009 Defensive Rookie of the Year Brian Cushing was suspended late last week for violating the league’s performance-enhancing drug policy and will miss the upcoming season’s first four games.
Fellow Texas-based athlete, Lance Berkman, took this opportunity to point out the chasm between how baseball players are treated as compared to football players.
The thing is, Berkman is wrong.
“The man’s a beast, I know that,” Berkman said about Cushing. “I didn’t see what he tested positive for. It said he violated the steroids policy. I will say what will be interesting will be to see the reaction because generally when that happens to a football player it is kind of ho-hum.
“You write a story about it and he serves his four games and nobody will ever say anything else about it. If that happens to a baseball player, they want to strike him from the record book. It’s a totally different reaction, and I’m not sure why that is … “
The MLB’s drug policy is to suspend a first-time violator 50 games, second-time violators 100 games and lifetimes bans for three-timers.
When a first-time violator is banned for 50 games, that’s about 31 percent of the player’s 162-game season. As football players only play 16 regular season games, a 50-game ban in MLB is equivalent to a 5-game ban in the NFL.
Is Lance Berkman referring to Cushing only getting a four-game ban instead of a five-game ban when painting NFL reactionaries with the ho-hum brush? Doubtful.
He’s probably referring to the rigor-moral that nips at the heels of marquee players like Manny Ramirez for months after suspicion or suspension. But notice that I added the term “marquee.” There were 23 other players (besides Ramirez) to be suspended in the five years before him. Go ahead and name a quarter of them.
Wikipedia doesn’t count. Close that tab, you’re cheating.
The fact is, the Cushing situation will coax more than a ho-hum reaction out of people – it already has – because … well, because he’s a talented player; a Pro-Bowler; a second-team all NFL defenseman, AP Rookie of the Year (maybe) and because Cushing himself isn’t ho-hum. Neither was Manny Ramirez.
J.C. Romero, on the other hand? Or Jay Gibbons … very little was made about those suspensions and it’s because they’re not marquee guys. After last year’s poll of retired NFL players revealed that 1-in-10 used performance enhancing drugs at some point in their careers, perhaps some of the this ho-hum reaction (if it exists, which it doesn’t) has manifested because, well, such behavior is ho-hum.
It’s unclear from his statement whether Berkman thinks the NFL populace is too lax or MLB’s populace is too harsh. He might be right about either or both, but in comparison to one another, they’re reasonably equal. Yeah, okay, Cushing is going to miss a quarter of his season instead of a third, but either way, he’s been punished.
Everything’s bigger in Texas, including the whining apparently.
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Photos courtesy of Yahoo! Sports via Getty Images
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