Fehr and Loathing

The point is - at least, I think the point is that if everyone was doing it, it doesn't give an advantage and maybe doesn't count as cheating. In fact, if everyone's doing it but you, you ought to do it to if you wanna stay a big league ballplayer. At least that's the Alex Rodriguez defense. It would have been a better one for Wally Joyner or Marvin Benard, but what the hell? It's what he's running with, and some folks seem to be buying it. It's obviously not about the actual, measurable amount that players improved by using steroids that matters. I've mentioned it here before, but what I find most unsettling about the whole PED shitfest is that MLB locker rooms were made into criminal enterprises. It's like the whole of fucking baseball was the White Sox locker room in 1919. Players juicing, players injecting other players, trainers selling it and peddling it, owners and managers either looking the other way (if they're telling the truth) or encouraging it (in the much more likely event then they're lying.) The worst of the lot was the unholy tandem of Don Fehr and Gene Orza, the snarling, yelping Orthus guarding the herd of superman would-be ballplayers.

Those two half-witted bastards pulled off the neat trick of simultaneously giving the players unfair advantages when the testing was taking place, and then completely fucking them afterwards. It's much too stupid-looking for there to have been serious malice involved, but I guess that is probably worse. Both of them ought to have been strung up on the ivy at Wrigley Field while Milton Bradley and Derek Lee pelt them repeatedly with line drives. Then they should be left there for the duration of the season, subsisting on whatever dribbles of Old Style and mustard dropping from some fat and wasted Bleacher Bum they can manage to catch on their tongues. New ground rule: any ball that hits either of those horrible morons is a home run if its in flight and a double if it bounces off the field first. I recognize that this might give the Cubs an advantage, something I would be loath to do under most circumstances, but most outfield walls don't have an easy punishment available. Fuck 'em.

It's really hard to blame individual players, as I see it. I agree that Jose Canseco, Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, Sammy Sosa and Alex Rodriguez are a nasty lot of people, none of who you'd want to have around your children or even close friends. But, and I hate to hop on the god-awful loosy-goosy excuse of Rodriguez's, it rings true that if everyone was doing it, then what the hell, why not? Just like Willie Mays and greenies. Big bowl of 'em in the clubhouse. Fuck it, they're gonna keep me awake, they're gonna make me heal faster, they're gonna make me hit more home runs, they're gonna extend my career and by extension make me millions of dollars, fuck it. I'm doing it. It's also really, really hard to blame the Paul Byrds and Andy Pettittes who were tying to get their injuries to heal faster. For Christ's sake, who the fuck wouldn't? Basically, as long as there were no consequences from baseball (another thing Orthus foamed at the mouth to prevent) for using, why the hell not? It was in everyone's best interest, career-wise, to do it. (Aside: not in their best interest for their lives outside of their careers, of course, which Ken Caminiti could tell us all about were it not for his miserable blow-and-juice filled body giving up on the whole goddamn thing when he was 41. As it is, Roger Clemens and Barry Bonds have got to consider that their life of parasailing and occasionally making a couple hundred grand at card-shows is probably completely fucked, so even though they both lived longer than that unlikely soothsayer Caminiti, their lives are on balance much worse for having taken steroids.) So the moral outrage, which I think is completely appropriate, is misdirected. 

It's those bastards making the rules that fucked this up. The best way to clean up baseball will be the immediate implication of my Ivy-plan. Donald Rumsfeld could run the fucking thing. He's not doing anything.