I watched Mark McGwire squirming in a chair licking his lips in front of Bob Costas answering a tirade of questions given to him about his steroid use. I was asking myself, "did we really need this?" I mean having Big Mac tell us that he used steroids was like asking a professional wrestler if wrestling was "staged." Any person that has watched to sport for any length of time or who just watches pre-1990 games on the MLB network can see that ballplayers just looked a lot smaller back then. Even the most feared hitters of their day (Frank Howard, Willie McCovey) look like the proverbial 98 pound weakling compared to the Lou Ferrigno bodies that guys like McGwire, Bonds, Sosa, Pujols (yeah Albert Pujols too) have.
How many more of these guys do we have to see squirm before us to satisfy our sadistic urges to make a kid caught with his hand in the cookie jar, admit that he was stealing cookies? Whose ego are we satisfying? So we got Roger Clemens being screamed at by a lot of worthless Senators who all have their own issues, to get him to say something they already knew. When is this going to end?
I have a niece who is dating a minor league "pitcher" who is bigger than anyone that goes regularly to my gym. Now considering all the time he spends pitching and the recovery time between starts, I doubt that he is hitting the gym too often without some type of "enhancer." And by the way he throws 96 miles an hour. He told me that just about everyone in the minors does something or they couldn't compete. Nothing short of a blood test could detect the things they are putting in their bodies today.
Do we want to force ballplayers to give blood samples every game? I think that is a lot of wasted effort for something that is not going to really change the game we are watching on the field.
Many writers want to refer to the 90's as the "steroid" era and maybe make a separate set of records for those times. Many of them forget that at the beginning of the 90's baseball interest was wanning especially after the players strike and it took a homerun race by Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa to re-ignite the sport. Since then there has been record attendance and virtually every team has been able to get a new ballpark. During the height of the era we had the 1997, 2001 and 2002 World Series which were three of the best of all time.
We have reached a new time in America where marijuana is becoming legal for medical purposes and athletes are using things to help increase their workouts and speed recovery times. This era is here to stay so let's deal with it and stop dragging another athlete in front of the camera to admit something that everyone already knows.
