- November 28, 2024
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If I have to read one more news story about Alex Rodriguez’s eventual, or maybe not, 211-game suspension from baseball, I’m telling you, I’m going to lose it.
All this talk about performance-enhancing drugs in sports lately. All these big reveals from steroid clinics All this drama. In the past decade or so, baseball has become about everything in the world except for baseball, and I for one am sick of it.
But for me, worst of all isn’t even the cheating, really. It’s the hypocrisy.
Everybody loves kicking all these stars off their pedestals when word gets out about their steroid use. You’ve got fans altering jerseys (Ryan “Bruan” to Ryan “Fraud”), allegations flying, suspensions looming.
But have you heard one single complaint about all of the other cheaters in the game? No, not just on the field; I mean everywhere.
Just look at some of these concessions guys, galloping up and down the stadium steps like gazelle. They make their rounds faster, yell louder and stay energized longer than almost all the other concessions guys, most of whom are pouring sweat and barely squeaking out their pitiful “Cracker Jacks …” and “Hot dogs …” by the ninth inning. But you think these limey scam artists get any flack or suspicion?
Good-for-nothings like them are likely taking home triple the tip money as their peers; they’re getting contract extensions; they’re winning MVPs (Most Valuable Popcorn Salesman) and they’re carving out their very own places in the cookie company-sponsored Hall of Fame-ous Amos. And yet, nobody’s doing anything to stop them. Nobody wants to believe they’ve been duped.
Nobody wants to believe these jokers are juicing.
Well I’m here to tell you to open your eyes, people! This controversy doesn’t start and stop in the clubhouse. It goes all the way to the top.
Do you seriously believe that Commissioner Bud Selig could have ever issued A-Rod a fat 211-game suspension (that’s a full season and a half) if he wasn’t injecting some sort of performance-enhancer before every big board meeting? The most games that washed up bum ever issued in a suspension in the past— when he was oh so conveniently younger and thinner — is probably 150. Tops.
But, just like that, this year he’s breaking records. Give me a break! The whole thing’s an epidemic.
The other day, my mailman suspiciously arrives at my door two hours earlier than usual, holding a package out toward me, big smile on his face, fishing for a tip. But it all felt just a bit too familiar.
“What’s in the box,” I asked him, “biogenesis!?” Then I slammed the door in his contemptible face.
He knew what he’d done.
The main thing we all need to take from this steroid scandal, though, is to not blindly lose faith in athletes we used to hold in such high, high regard, solely based on a few indiscretions.
It’s to lose faith in everyone.
Miguel Cabrera may win the Triple Crown for the second consecutive year this season, but who cares? How do we know he’s not doping? Clayton Kershaw's season ERA is under 2.00. But as pop-poet Shania Twain would say: “That don’t impress me much!”
And then there's my mom, who made a killer pasta and meatballs last Sunday. But you think I told her so? I couldn’t stomach the chance that I’d put myself out there again only to discover later that there had been foul play.
Listen, I’ve lived through Bonds, McGuire and Sosa. I’ve suffered the likes of Clemens. The past two years, my fantasy team has lost a league stat leaguer after steroid records leaked. And now A-Rod. Oh, A-Rod.
So I’m sorry, Mom, but I’ve just been burned too many times. The days of legends are behind us. Even if you’re not juicing, how do I know you’re not corking your wooden spoon?
How sweet it would be to go back to the good, old days of 1990s baseball, when things were so much simpler, since the players were on strike. Or of 1980s baseball, when the only drug players took in excess was cocaine. Or even of the earlier days, when the game was pure. Back then, the whole sport could be explained in one single sentence, from respectable players, like Yogi Berra.
“Good pitching will always stop good hitting,” he said — “and vice versa.”
BY MIKE CAVALIERE | ASSOCIATE EDITOR
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