An interesting event took place last week in Major League Baseball. Baltimore Orioles first baseman Rafael Palmeiro was told by the team to sit out the rest of the season. His status for next season is up in the air, also.
The management of the Orioles, headed by interim manager Sam Perlozzo, did the right thing here by telling Palmeiro to sit out the rest of the season.
The main reason that the Orioles told him to sit out the rest of the season was because he named fellow teammate Miguel Tejada in his hearing because of the 10 game suspension for steroids he received which occurred back on August 1st.
It’s evident looking at Palmeiro stats that since his return from his suspension his play has been on the downward spiral.
After he returned to the game, he went 2 for 26 with one RBI and then was sent home on September 5th to rehab his right knee and left ankle.
The Orioles record going into Tuesday’s night game versus the New York Yankees was 70-86, sixteen games below the .500 mark. They are in 4th place in the AL East.
These statistics are ridiculous once you consider the amount of money that the Orioles management spent in the offseason to build the team into a playoff contender.
In addition to going out and signing Tejada, they also got Javy Lopez from the Atlanta Braves and Sammy Sosa from the Chicago Cubs. This team must want all of MLB’s bad boys on one team with Sosa and Palmeiro.
This season Palmeiro became the fourth player in baseball history to achieve 3,000 hits and 500 home runs. If the Baseball Hall of Fame voters have any sense to them, they will question these statistics and decline to vote him into the Hall of Fame because of this.
Baseball fans got to remember that Palmeiro was the same person who testified on Capitol Hill earlier this summer and said that he never uses steroids.
Palmeiro went to extreme measures to deal with baseball fans. This was displayed in the Orioles game a couple of weeks ago when he wore ear plugs against the Toronto Blue Jays because he tried to block out the hecklers in the crowd.
Major League Baseball also just recently released a statement that said players are willing to accept a 20 game suspension for their first offense of testing positive for steroids. If this suspension is put into effect maybe it might teach the players a lesson and they will think twice about using the juice.
Fans of baseball will now have to wait and see how this scenario plays out. It can’t happen this season because the playoffs start next week. However, this case will be one of the major stories in Major League Baseball’s offseason and we sure haven’t heard the end of this saga.