It's a pretty easy recipe to follow.
Take one late-blooming slugger who is putting up the best statistics of his career at age 37. Add a blogger who is determined to figure out where such a jump in production could come from. Mix in a little speculation over whether performance-enhancing drugs could have been involved and - voila! - you have instant controversy.
Congratulations, Raul Ibanez of the Philadelphia Phillies. You're the latest addition to Major League Baseball's never-ending steroids scandal.
Ibanez made headlines Wednesday when he responded to a post made on the MidwestSportsFans blog by the site's managing editor Jerod Morris (under the handle JRod).
Morris included a detailed statistical analysis of a number of different factors in Ibanez's improvement, ranging from his move to the hitter-friendly Citizen's Bank Park in Phladelphia to the pitching opposition he has faced. But as "unstated speculation" he alluded to the possibility of steroids, and that was the spark that lit off this latest controversial powderkeg.
Ibanez's response essentially boiled down to two things:
1. Test him any way you want (including hair, blood, urine, stool and pretty much any other bodily fluid you can get out of him) and he'll prove he's clean.
2. He doesn't take kindly to libel, especially the kind that comes from JRod's blog.
Ibanez, by most accounts from those who know him, is as hard-working a player as you will find in the major leagues and there's every bit as much reason to believe that he's earning his numbers the honest way. With no indication other than numbers to go on, it's tough to drop a suggestion like steroids without expecting some sort of backlash.
In Morris' defense, he said he is rooting for Ibanez to do well this year, but you can't really blame Ibanez for being royally ticked off over what was said about him.
Unfortunately for Ibanez, it's not the summer of 1998 anymore. These days, baseball fans are looking at statistics with a much more discerning eye - and who can blame them? Since the MLB began looking into the steroids issue, some of the biggest names in baseball have been tied to performance-enhancing drugs.
Roger Clemens has had his career legacy tarnished amid steroid speculation. This year, two of baseball's biggest sluggers - Alex Rodriguez and Manny Ramirez - were caught dead-center in PED controversies of their own.
The soft spot left in our hearts by Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa's home run chase 11 years ago has since been replaced with the cold, hard realization that in today's ballgame, you just don't know who to trust.
In that light, it's hard to pretend that Morris was the only one who could have considered the notion that Ibanez could be on PEDs. The idea was already out there. Morris just brought it into a public forum.
But unfortunately for Morris, it's not the summer of 1998 anymore. We live in a day and age where Shaq can send a Twitter post about what he had for breakfast and, faster than you can say the word "blogosphere," it'll be a newsflash on every major news network.
That may be a bit of an exaggeration, but in reality, if someone touches on a hot-button issue on the Internet, the ensuing controversy has the potential to spread like wildfire.
This whole situation serves as a reminder of how the times have changed quite a bit over the last 10 years or so. These days, no player is completely immune to allegations of cheating. And these days, any fan that makes his or her voice loud enough can get swept up in a controversy that hits the front pages of ESPN and Sports Illustrated.
Morris should have been a little more careful with his words when he posted on his blog, but in today's world, someone else was bound to do so in similar fashion if he had not. It's not Ibanez's fault that all of this is happening. That's just the way things are in baseball these days.
Maybe at one point we'll all be able to appreciate a guy having a season like the one Ibanez is having right now, but until then, we'll have to settle for the controversies.
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