Baseball's latest drug scandal: Manny Ramirez is impersonating Octomom to gain a competitive edge.
Yeah, another superstar is juicing. Raise your mouse if you were astonished. Maybe you were disappointed, maybe you were a little angry, maybe you were indifferent. But shocked? Please.
So for fun, let's grab a few MLB stars not entirely at random from the Canseco era, say, 1988-2008. Let's classify them into clever categories that represent my hypothetical reaction to the hypothetical news (for now) that they're on a performance enhancer.
FICST (Fine, I Can See That)
Randy Johnson. Bret Boone. Ryan Howard. David Ortiz. Pedro Martinez. Joe Carter. Dave Winfield. Johan Santana. Brandon Webb. Roy Halladay. Adrian Beltre. Sammy Sosa. Luis Gonzalez. Vlad Guerrero. Juan Gonzalez. Rickey Henderson. Frank Thomas. Larry Walker.
RATS (Really, A Tiny Surprise)
Jamie Moyer. Derek Jeter. Maddux-Smoltz-Glavine. Nolan Ryan. Kirby Puckett. Albert Pujols.
BITES (Baseball Is Tarnished EverlaStingly)
Junior. Ichiro. Edgar. Ripken.
So, so many big names are missing from these lists. For good reason. They've been caught already.
It pains me to associate some of my favorite players with the stench of cheating, even in a tongue-in-cheek way. On the other hand, steroid use has only ever bothered me on a statistical level. I'm pretty sure half the guys or more on each team were juicing, so I tend to believe the competitive integrity of the game was not grossly compromised. The playing field was level, so to speak, by the scope of the cheating. It's just that 762 really ticks me off, as does this entire page.
I'm not going to demand that "baseball clean up its act" or that it change its ways "for the good of the children." I'm going to helplessly shake my head and hope that the BITES list never comes to pass. That's the only good outcome left.
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