Joe Sheehan's "There Is No Clean":
The biggest lie of the so-called "steroid era" -- and the intellectually bankrupt way in which the media has convicted the approved villains of that era -- is that we know who didn't use. We do not and we never will. Assumptions that Thomas or Maddux or Jim Thome or Ken Griffey Jr. or Derek Jeter are "clean" are as meaningless as assumptions that Jeff Bagwell or Mike Piazza or Sammy Sosa are not. We don't know. We don't know because no one ever looked so deeply into those players as they did into Bonds, as they did into Armstrong. You can't read sports-drug use by looking at a person's body, and you can't read it by looking at a stat line, and you damned sure can't read it based on who's answering questions in front of his locker after a tough loss. Too often, though, that's how those decisions have been made.
We don't know. We'll never know. To grant the presumption of innocence to some and not to all, though, is to ignore just how hard and how expensive it has been to gain the minimal knowledge we have about the people who have been the primary targets of investigation. It's time to stop designating some players as "clean", because the gap between "clean" and "dirty" is really just about who ****** off the wrong people.