I’ve mentioned my love-hate relationship with baseball before, and here comes another reason to hate it (additional articles here, here and here). The worst kept secret ever (it’s kind of hard to hide the fact that your arms and chest have doubled in size over the winter…) is that Jason Giambi (intentionally) and Barry Bonds (unintentionally – yeah, right) used steroids to transform themselves into a somewhat above average player and one of the best ever, respectively. Holy cow – next thing you know we’ll learn that Mark McGuire and Jose Canseco took steroids too! The player’s union should be running to the owners with a proposal to aggressively test for steroids and ban the cheaters. How can anyone idolize these jack-asses, much less pay them millions of dollars? The biggest losers (other than the fans, but nobody cares about them anyway) are the hundreds of clean players who are just muddling along not cheating and getting “average” pay because they can only crank 25 or 30 a year out of the yard. And it’s not just the personal records that bother me. Would the Giants or the A’s have been playoff teams without their steroid-enhanced stars? Why haven’t the clean players filed an unfair labor practice against the player’s union for failure to represent by dragging its feet on the steroid issue? What possible benefit is there to the players as a whole to have a bunch of cheaters juicing and thereby outperforming the guys who are playing by the rules? Baseball has enough problems without these self-inflicted wounds. I’m not too optimistic that they’ll do anything about this one, which may lead to government intervention (McCain is threatening it). And while the libertarian in me knows that getting the government involved can only make the situation worse, I have to admit that it would be fun to watch – baseball, the union and the congress deserve each other.
