Steroid use in baseball is de facto legitimate, but everybody is embarrassed about it. Now the charade is over.
It shouldn't take grand jury investigations or a whole bunch of time or money to find out who is using what in order to play baseball any better. All we have to do is drop the phony 'enforcement' regime and bring the whole practice into the open, which is to say legalize it. The game everybody has been watching and enjoying, they have been doing so under false premises. Instead of just Barry Bonds, it was him and a sizable fraction of the entire league, including coaches, doctors, owners, and other associated weed carriers. If you thought baseball was 'pure', now you must live with knowing you've been in love with a fake.
Everybody should admit that it doesn't get any worse than this. All of major league baseball is an asterisk. Not literally all, but symbolically all. There is no longer a situation in which performance enhancing drug uses can be asterisked into compartmentalized areas. The stink permeates the entire sport and there is no more walling it off. You can now add baseball as the fourth horse. It is now sex, drugs, rock & roll and baseball. Mom and apple pie stand alone.
From this moment forward, the only hypocrisy left is a crackdown. I've have said it before. Professional baseball needs performance enhancement because of the very nature of the competition. Chess, for example, does not. In golf, it's the technology of the tools that undergo the change. Basketball, is the 'purest' major sport left. As for the nobility of sport itself and messages to kids:
There seems to me nothing inherent in the values we seek to revere in sport which limit them to football or baseball. If there is a such thing as athletic nobility, surely it can't be limited to a handful of contests. The thrill of victory and the agony of defeat, the human drama of athletic competition, certainly all of these are found in sports other than those we dote upon. So it seems to me that some of our ethical dilemma in picking the wrong sports heroes because we are picking the wrong sports. Think about it this way, there was once a time when boxing was considered the domain of athletic nobility. That is no longer the case. Although some would argue that we have lost something permanently as a showcase for heroism, I say it has just moved on to another sport. We are not at a loss for heroes, they just work another arena. Or maybe our society doesn't value courage, strength and speed as much as we thought.
But let's say we allowed drugs in our pro sports. Whatever the values our society places on its mastery I think it is absurd to assume that the critical elements of every sport would become threatened by generally allowing dope. I could be wrong, but I don't believe that we know so much about long distance running as we know about weightlifting. Every highschool kid knows that steroids will grow the kind of muscle mass that makes for a better weightlifter, but what kind of drug makes one a better ski jumper, a better hockey goalie, a better golfer a better video gamer?
So I think that people should admit that it's not the drugs, but the cheating that makes the difference in athletic nobility. If we allowed it, the drug regimen would become just another part of the diet and training discipline athletes use. For those who believe that a drug free purity is necessary, create another class of competition. I happen to think that the Olympic Games best suits the class of competition which should be drug free. After all, many of these are the sports which have little else going for them but the prestige of athletic nobility.
This is baseball is on drugs. Get over it.
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