RCS: In your book, The Soul of Baseball, in which you travel across the country with the great Negro League player and even greater personality Buck O'Neil, he gave you an amazing quote. He documented all the ways players in his day cheated and said, "The only reason players in my time didn't use steroids is because we didn't have them."

In the steroids debate, is this an overlooked point?

Posnanski: I think it's a very overlooked point. I would even take it one step further. I mean he repeated that point numerous times, I've heard him say it probably twenty to twenty five times. Every time he would say, even when he was still alive and people were talking to him and he was saying these words, people refused to think that that's what he really believed. They'd always be like, "Well, yeah, I know what you're saying, but don't you think these players are terrible and they shouldn't have ever done this and so on and so forth."

But that was honestly how Buck felt, and it was honestly his belief was that everyone in baseball and probably various other things as well, people are looking for and edge. These are prime athletes playing at the very, very peak of their games, and they need an edge to survive and to be successful. Buck would talk about them cutting baseballs, and spitting on them, and taking different, not necessarily illegal things, before a game. Things like drinking 20 cups of coffee before a game, and other things like that. Anything to get that edge.

I can tell you, because I heard him say it enough times, there is no doubt about it that Buck O'Neil feels like if the players of the forties and fifties had the steroid option, many of them would have taken them. He never said he would have, and I don't know the answer to that question because Buck has always been kind of a guy who sort of rolls above his time. But he was adamant saying the reason we didn't use them was because we didn't have them, and that was absolutely the way he felt about it.

10 Questions with Joe Posnanski