heeeey, maaaan...you want some juice?

[THIS POST

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Just saw this article about baseball's troubles on Yahoo! while I was going to check on my spam collection (maybe you can fill me in a bit on what’s happened since Bones broke the HR record, as I have not kept up at all). The news here makes me wonder what the hell is gonna happen with this whole situation.

One thing's for sure: it’s bigger than baseball. It’s bigger than any one sport. Take the Tour de France, one of the world’s elite events: the juice flows through those cyclists’ tortured bloodstreams like garbage down the Tijuana River. Track and field, the sport that crowns a man with the title of world’s fastest human, until another man comes along to unseat him (same thing on the women’s side), is completely juiced: its top stars, world-record-breaking phenoms such as Carl Lewis, Michael Johnson and Flojo, are all among the “guilty” ones. The NFL was juicing up since the early ‘70s, if not earlier.

<----TIMES HAVE SURE CHANGED!!

The leagues have ALL known about this and, in my opinion, even promoted it (or, at the very least, turned a blind eye), such as with the now-infamous home run race between Sosa and McGwire. The leagues are not entirely unlike governments: they brashly refuse to acknowledge things that are not in their best interests financially, even if those things are harmful—or devastating—to the very core of their community.

To me, what the pro sports leagues have been doing for the past few decades is just as absurd as, say, what a national government does when lying through their teeth about why they are involved in a certain war (citing pathetic excuses like threatening “axes of evil” or simply skirting the issue altogether), because that’s exactly what they’re doing (naming names, singling people out when they know full well that it’s a generalized practice, not a freak occurrence among 15 glory-seeking fanatics: it’s not just the record breakers taking the stuff! And where do they suppose all these players get it? Hmmm…team trainers, perhaps?).

I don’t profess to have any simple solutions, as it’s a much bigger issue than “performance-enhancing drugs,” but I will say that it's a bit sad to see how many people (sports fans) are offered this dishonest product--called "major league baseball" in this case--and still choose to buy it, literally and figuratively. There will always be plenty of imperfection any time a sport or industry gets big enough, but in most cases, products at least deliver what the customer expects. Here, it's all been inflated and burst like a fart in the bathtub: the excitement/vibration is gone, and the fans still remaining are left with nothing but the stinky air. : (