still not rubbin it

All this steroid hoopla has produced a laundry list of side effects. There are ones that are well documented (shriveled testes, back hair and the puzzling relevance of people like Tom Verducci). First off, let me say that for my money the term "side effects" has an undeservedly bad rep. I mean, sure, cirrhosis is a side effect from drinking, but then again so is being sexier and funnier. Smoking may give you cancer, but it also just makes you look so damn cool. It's times like these when i reflect on the sage words that Mrs. Garret used to so softly croon to me..."You take the good, you take the bad, you take them both, and there you have...the facts of life".

Sure it's tough to see our heros like Chuck Knoblauch, Guillermo Mota, and Jay Gibbons have their names drug through the mud. It makes me weep to imagine how many kids sadly chose to abandon their longstanding habit of arguing over who gets to be Paul Byrd whilst having a wiffle in the back yard. But being an eternal optimist, I say that there are some good things that come from this.

I know that I, for one, prostrate myself daily to the Gods to thank them for bringing the personage of Rusty Hardin into my life. Hardin is taking a break to defend Clemens from his regular lot in life, which is, I believe serving as the Platonic Form for sanctimonius, self -righteous asshole. This is the only guy who could put Roger Clemens' disillusionment in the shadow of his own. Hardin has said on record time and again that any evidence that suggests his client used PED's is patently false, and has been fabricated by Brian McNamee. This is the greatest legal defense stratgey ever.

I can just imagine all other lawyers in the world having a Happy Gilmore moment and saying, "That's it, I should just make assanine and paranoid blanket statetements that exonerate my client while simultaneously inferring that anyone who is not in agreement with us is a liar, a backstabber and a fraud. Oh, that, AND I should just hit the ball in the hole on the first shot every time".

Without getting too political here, does it really surprise anybody that Roger Clemens (an ardent Bush supporter) would hire a guy like Rusty Hardin to be his lawyer? This is the take home version of the "If You're Not Wth Us, Your With the Terorists" game show. These guys are in effect, putting their thumbs in their ears and screaming "la la la...i can't hear you" whenever anybody disagrees, or God forbid provides some kind of evidence to support a contrary opinion. It's kinda like tryin to explain a pass interefernce call on a UK secondary player to Toots, but in this case Toots looks and sounds a lot like the love child that Creed from "The Office" had with Jerry Jones, and the UK secondary player statutory- raped Mindy McReady.

And where would we be without ESPN on all this? Thank God I can tune in at basically any time of the day onto the Deuce and hear Mike Golic's opinion on steroids in baseball. It's this kinda ridiculous excuse for "synergy" that is responsible for abomonations like Cowboy Troy ( the Big n' Rich version, not the unsolvable connundrum of how an Oklahoma redneck would up at UCLA before quarterbacking the world's douchiest sideshow to three Super Bowl wins). It surely takes a little bit of moxie to admit to this, but save us the sugar coating. Yes you were injured, yes, the steroids helped you recover. But in my mind saying that you used steroids soley to recover from injury is akin to saying that you go out to bars that are frquented by known road whores because you are lonely and want to settle down and get married. Sure, I mean if one of those road whores winds up being really wealthy or double jointed or something, you might eventually marry her, but you first picked her up because you knew she was a road whore and you wanted to get laid. In this way "recovery from injury" is euphamistic for "younger/healthier/more talented guys were gonna take my job", ( so i cheated). In both instances, the easiest route has been taken to achieve a goal that was set out of self-interest, to serve a self-fulfilling purpose.

I think that the crux of the issue here is the culture that surrounds baseball. We need look no further than the old mantra that says when you get hit by a pitch, you at least wait 'til you get to the dugout before you rub the now-surely bruised and vericose point of contact. This is conventional baseball wisdom, but nobody entreated Anquan Bolden not to acknowledge his fractured orbital. We are used to metaphors that portray Butkus and Nitschke and Ray Lewis as "warriors". The most imtimidating baseball players are the power pitchers, and their intimidation factor is greatly discounted by the fact that you are supposed to act unfazed if you get drilled by a fastball from one of them. Nobody would question the toughness of an NFL player who requires assistance to get off the field after recieveng or delivering a vicious hit.

Surely, the six-month long grind of a major league baseball season is a tremendously daunting proposition, I think everybody would acknowledge that. But if that is true, then where is baseball's analogy to the famous Kellen Winslow game? All I can come up with is Cal Ripken, Jr who only needed what 16 plus consecutive seasons without missing a single game to earn similar status to what Winslow got from playing a transcendant ONE? Maybe Brett Favre's consecutive games started record is a better analogy here to use in conjunction with Ripken, but honestly, I think that Favre's record is only the equal of Ripken's. That is to say that I don't immediately give the nod to Favre because his is the "tougher" of the two sports. I grant you that any given football game is most likelly clearly more physiclly intense than any given baseball game. Combine that attitude with the public's still dominant and incorrect assumption that most MLB players used steroids to gain superior strength and speed (like a football player might), versus the fact that the greatest gains steroids make for most baseball players is not in their skill but in their conditioning, and it is easy to see why so many baseball players are villified for something that we more or less have given NFL guys a pass for for so long.