Come Back With My Show! I Mean MVP!

The steroids era has improved many a baseball players career. I need not say any more about that, think we can all agree. With that improvement came money, but often it also included some hardware, some MVPs. ESPN's Rick Reilly has decided to give back those MVPs to the rightful owners:

Let's start by bringing former Red Sox Mike Greenwell up to the podium. Greenie lost the 1988 AL MVP to Jose Canseco, who admitted in his book, "Juiced," that he cheated worse than Rosie Ruiz that year to win it. Canseco even told Howard Stern that Greenwell, now a high school coach in Fort Myers, Fla., "should stop by the house" to pick up the award. No need, Mike! Here it is. Should look sweet on the mantel.

"Man," Greenwell said when I called him. "I guess I'll just say it's been a long time coming. I even remember telling Jose once, 'Man, I'd love to have your power.' And he said, 'Come to Miami and I'll hook you up!' But I never did."

And why not?

"My wife and I were trying to have a baby and she basically said if I went on steroids, she'd kill me." Now he's got two boys. Healthy ones.

It's hard to call a guy like Jose Canseco sincere but you have to say he doesn't seem half bad right? I guess he looks as good as a man could after admitting cheated more than usual for his 1988 MVP.

And here's yours from 2001, Luis Gonzalez, after you finished behind The Barry Bonds Pharmacy. We won't even mention the home run title you would've won that year.

Now, for the man of the night. I have a U-Haul of hardware here for Jose Alberto Pujols Alcántara of the St. Louis Cardinals. You already have two MVPs, Albert, and you're about to get three more, since Barry Bonds ripped you off worse than Bernie Madoff to win the award from 2002 to 2004. You hit .335 and averaged 41 bombs those years and yet you finished second behind the clearly creaming Bonds in '02 and '03, and third behind Bonds and Adrian Beltre in '04. We're throwing out Beltre since, while he denies ever using PEDs, he fell off the face of the planet once baseball put in stricter steroid suspensions in 2005. If he wasn't cheating, I'm the Queen Mother. And this is history we're making here. It gives you five MVPs, and nobody else in baseball history now has more than three.

I think it's a great idea in general to go back in time and see who got screwed out of awards because the voters don't really get it right a lot of the time. And I think it's interesting to do it based on how steroids affected the results. But can we really know for sure who did not use? Are we really fixing up the MVP award when we take it from Bonds and give it to Luis Gonzalez? If you want to take away Adrian Beltre's votes because of suspicion how could you confidently give an award to Luis Gonzalez? Adrian Beltre's spike was his 25 age season in a contract year in the first year of testing in 2004. Luis Gonzalez's spike was in 2001 at 33 years old, possibly at the peak of steroid use.

I know Reilly is more about having a good time with this, and I'm all for anything that gives Albert more respect, but I was annoyed at how he took away Beltre's accomplishments while rewarding Luis Gonzalez. We will really never know who was and who wasn't on the juice. If all 104 names come out we will know more people who did use, but we still can't find proof of who didn't so all we have left is hope, hope that players we like and think are clean keep that reputation, maybe even if they weren't. So that's one thing Rick Reilly and I could definitely agree on "Just don't let us down on this thing, Albert. You know what we're talking about."