Lame Sports

Baseball’s Back! A Case For the Juice

By Chris St. Jacques

This week baseball players around the United States are putting down their beers, putting their La-Z-Boys in their upright and locked position and reporting for Spring Training.  Fans start winding down from the fast action/hard hitting NFL season and begin to settle in for the 162 game season that is Major League Baseball.  But what is the question on everybody’s mind?  Will the BoSox repeat?  Will Joe Torre be good for the Dodgers?  Will the Phillie Phanatic finally win a spot in the starting rotation?  The answer of course is… None of the above.  Why?  Simply put, everyone and their mother is talking about steroids. 

Steroids are now part of baseball forever.  A quick analogy:  Steroids are to Baseball as A-Rod is to? 

A. Home Runs

B. Milk

C. Scrapbooking

D. Emotional Cripple

E. All of the Above

The answer at the end of the article. 

For better or worse steroids are here, and they’re here to stay.  But the question I have:  Is that really such a bad thing? 

Wait a second, hear me out.  I am a big fan of baseball but the difference between your grandfather and me is I don’t let myself get hung up on this “purity of the game” nonsense.  (That and I don’t whittle.) 

Who likes home runs?  I do!  Who hits the most home runs?  Guys on steroids.  Without steroids Hank Aaron would still be the all-time home run leader and he is 74 years old.  Do we really want a 74 year old being the best at anything, much less hitting home runs? Hell, all the players before Barry Bonds should be ashamed that they got whooped by a 74 year old. 

Editor’s Note: We tried to inform Mr. St Jacques that Hank Aaron wasn’t 74 when he hit all, or any, of his home runs but he was too hopped up on “Benzies” to do a rewrite.  We apologize.

Who is hurt by steroids anyway?  Not me.  Shoot, they make it possible for me to sit through a three hour plus contest that doesn’t involve tackling or fighting. 

The players?  Sure their bodies may fall apart when they stop taking them, but that’s a simple fix, just don’t stop taking them.  Do they cause death?  I don’t know.  I’m not a doctor (at least not any more…  Damn AMA.)  But even if they do kill you, they don’t do it until you’re like 40 or 50 and by then you’re usually too old to hit a ball anyway. 

So here’s what you do:

• Take a lot of steroids.

• Hit a lot of home runs and make a lot of money.

• Don’t stop taking steroids.

• Retire at 30 with millions of dollars, buy an island and finish your life surrounded by the ones you love (or black jack and women) in the lap of luxury. Who wants to be old anyway?

One final criticism against steroid use that always gets thrown around is that high school and even middle school kids look at these professional athletes and feel the need to compete and start in on “the juice” at a young age.  That is flawed logic because kids shouldn’t look up to baseball players, at all!   They should look up to real athletes like football players or astronauts. 

I just had a son and one of my friends asked me how I would feel if in a few years my kid made the high school baseball team, and was confronted with the option of taking steroids or not making the team.  That really got me thinking.  Right then and there I made the choice to not allow my kid to be forced to make such a tough decision.  So, I did a little research and, as of Monday, I will be starting my 11 month old on 11 week Testosterone Cypionate 400mg cycle and maybe stack 400mg of Deca/200 on top of that for ten weeks. That, combined with 12 to 14 hours a day on a jungle gym should put him on track to bend his baby buggy in half by Christmas, and capable of benching his father by mid May ‘09.  

What it comes down to is that we as fans have the final say.  We speak with our wallets and buy tickets to see our favorite team win (or lose pathetically after the All-Star break, if you’re a Dodger fan like me.)  Fans like to see records shattered and the dreams of the elderly crushed.  That is what makes sports so glorious.  No record is unbeatable thanks to American companies like BALCO.  Besides, do we really want to go back to a time when Mickey Mantle was considered a baseball god?  I mean, he smoked cigarettes!  CIGARETTES!  That can’t happen, think of the children.  I’m just sayin’. 

The answer to the analogy above is:

E.  All of the Above.

And for those keeping score at home…  Yes, A-Rod is an avid scrap-booker.

© LameSports.net