RCS: During the Raul Ibanez/Jerrod Morris controversy, people looked to you a voice of reason. In your Sports Illustrated column you wrote, "This is the Twister game sportswriters play now. We are skeptical but hopeful, cynical but cautious, vigilant but docile. In other words, we are lost. Nobody can ignore the PED issue or the fans' mistrust, not in these times."

In this era, in which it's nearly impossible to tell which players have taken steroids and which haven't, how should these types of conversations ideally take place?

Posnanski: I don't know what the ideal is today in today's world, because we're sort of stuck in this weird middle ground where it's very, very difficult to trust anything, and yet on the other hand, who wants to mistrust everything when it comes to sports?

Sports are supposed to be about an escape from the daily life, and it's still supposed to be fun, and it's still supposed to resonate with you in ways that other things don't. So it's tough. I think what struck me about the whole Raul Ibanez-Jerrod Morris thing is that I'm pretty close with Raul. I've known him since he was in Kansas City and I've known him a long time, and to me he's one of the most admirable people I know in sports. He's a wonderful, wonderful guy, and I would have absolutely no qualms about saying that I have absolutely no doubt he's never used steroids. As much as we can know about somebody, I mean we can always be surprised, but I have no doubt that he doesn't.

Yet at the same time I thought what Jerrod Morris wrote was exactly what I think people were thinking, which is "Hey look, I'm not saying he's doing it, I'm just saying in today's world where all of these guys are putting up sort of unusual numbers at ages that don't match up, in this environment and this world, how can you not be a little bit mistrustful?" What he did was he went and tried to find some numbers that would indicate that maybe he didn't do it, and he wasn't able to find those numbers. I think it's risky poker to try to figure out things just through the numbers, but I thought it was a genuine attempt to try and bring some sanity to it. He just got hammered for it, probably because of a poor headline choice on his part. But he got hammered for it and I thought it was really unfair because I think it's exactly what we're all wrestling with.

You ask me what the ideal is, but I don't know that there is an ideal. The ideal would be that none of this ever happened. In the world that we're in now people are going to have distrust about certain things, and I think we need to be upfront about it and face it. One thing I don't think we need to do is charge people unfairly for anything. But by the same token we can't have our heads in the ground anymore. This is out there, and this is what people are thinking and talking about, and I don't think it's going to go away any time soon.

10 Questions with Joe Posnanski`