Over at ESPN.com, Gene Wojciechowski proposes his version of baseball’s last stand in the crusade against Guys Who I Can’t Believe Juiced:

If I ever see Jeter’s name attached to the hip of performance enhancers, I’m done. I mean it — I’ll never watch another big league game again. Because if Captain Pinstripes could do the Vitamin S deed, then anybody can.

Jeter’s name is where I draw the line in the PED sand. He is the absolute last guy I’d ever suspect of juicing. It seems so, well, beneath him. He is the one player who I actually think would walk away from the game if he thought he had to cheat to compete.

Casting aside the fit of blind rage that comes with the sight of yet another ESPN contributor gushing over someone employed by either of the northeasternmost ballclubs, even the closest examination of Woj’s beliefs forces the whole idea to crumble; the great tragedy of performance-enhancing drugs has never been their actual use (although let’s not belittle the dangers of many a steroid out there), but the cover-up and systemic denial of their existence. With so many big names (bigger than Jeter, even) already out in the open, it’s becoming increasingly harder to find anyone who genuinely cares whether or not Player X had some sort of chemical help, but it’s even rarer to find anyone who likes being lied to about what goes on in the sport by millionaires who earn their living playing a child’s game. Alex Rodriguez, arguably the biggest name of them all, got burned not for doing steroids, or even for getting caught, but for telling Katie Couric he never even touched the stuff.

Throughout those years of MLB’s ever-evolving stance on steroids and HGH, from “no one does those” to “it’s isolated at worst” to “it’s under control” to “I guess it’s pretty big” to “we’ve been all over this all along,” a lot of people’s careers improved thanks to the chemical boost, be it through inflated paydays, names in the record books, or collective team successes they might not have otherwise seen. In that era, no team won more games that matter than the New York Yankees, and no franchise has been tied to more known juicers than those same Yankees.
And throughout those years, one man was the face, the voice and the captain of those Yankees. His employer boasted perhaps the biggest cover-up of them all while reaping the rewards on a larger scale than anyone else in the land, and that great leader never said a word except to praise good, clean guys like Jose Canseco and Roger Clemens.

Is Derek Jeter a good baseball player? Certainly. A nice guy? Probably. On steroids? Who knows, but most likely not. Has he ever taken a righteous stand against those who dare besmirch the good name of the game he plays? No. Was he ever the problem? No. Was he complicit with and part of the problem? Yes. Has he at all benefited – directly or indirectly – from any kind of banned substance? Yes. from Has he used his position to keep alive that non-existent Pure Baseball Way? No. No he has not.

Does this make him a great teammate? Absolutely. Does this make him the last bastion of everything pure about baseball? Absolutely not … so how could anyone possibly think that?