According to Rick Reilly on espn.com, the MVP awards given to admitted juicers should be forfeited by the users and given to the rightful owners (non-dopers that finished as runners up in a particular year’s voting). In Reilly’s mind, the winners of MVP awards such as Alex Rodriguez, Barry Bonds, Sammy Sosa and Ken Caminiti should be stripped of their prizes and they should be reassigned to the people who finished 2nd in the voting, provided that person is not an admitted PED policy violator.

The problem with this argument (and the problem with restoring confidence in the numbers in general) is that we’re still smack-dab in the middle of the discovery process about who is and who isn’t clean. For example, Reilly says Albert Pujols should receive the 2004 NL MVP because the winner, Bonds (who has not yet been proven to have taken drugs) is a juicer. The runner-up that year was Adrian Beltre who has not been outed but Reilly suspects he was using so he’s out of the running too. So I guess the natural extention of Reilly’s argument is that he should (with no evidence other than his hunches–see the Beltre case) retroactively retool the baseball record book to suit his suspicions.

In a way I don’t blame Reilly for his anger or his desire to see a solution to the issue of the tarnished record book. His argument is a reflection of how many in the media are so passionate about righting the wrongs of the steroids era. The problem is that as each day goes on we discover someone else is guilty. So with that, if we award past MVPs to guys like Albert Pujols (who has dropped out of the World Baseball Classic–an event that uses IOC anti-doping blood tests–I’m just saying) who’s to say that we won’t find out he’s guilty too?

Chill out, Reilly boy. Give it some time. Once we have all the facts in place (maybe years from now) then we’ll go to Sam’s Club for the White-Out. Until we know for sure, we just have to live with the uncertainty.