Steroid-related hypotheticals

• A guy who took 'roids for the same amount of time as Big Mac. This guy, though, wasn't as good. He never made it to the big leagues. He never even made it to AAA. His minor league career was a series of moves from one medium-sized city to another, never making all that much money, always working his ass off, and now that he retired he is sorta fucked as far as his employable skill set goes. Even in low A baseball he was around incredible players from all over the country, all sacrificing so much to try to make a career in pro ball. These guys were so good any little edge could be what separated them. So this guy started using the 'roids. Let's say by some weird circumstance he used exactly the amount of 'roids Big Mac used, through the exact same time-frame, breaking the exact same laws and all that. Do we hate this guy? Do we punish him the same way? Do we pity him more? Is it more tragic? Is he less guilty because he was less of a role model?
  
  
• How about a guy who took HGH until the day before it was outlawed by the mlb. Before that, let's say he took, Idunno, andro or whatnot until it was illegal. Basically this is a guy who took every available PED until the day before it made the list of illegal substances. He never broke the laws of the US or the mlb. Do we judge him the same way anyhow? Are the morals involved attached to laws and regulations?
  
  
• What about like how people get upset at certain countries' gymnastics programs. Say they don't use any PEDs, but they start rigorous training really early in a kid's life. It maybe stunts the kids' growth. But of course it pays off, they become amazing gymnasts. How about that? Is that ok? No drugs or nothin'. No laws broken. Just a really amped up training regimen. Is that fair? To dip below our own culture's ideas of when is too young to push a kid that hard? At what age do you draw the line?
  
  
• How about the guy who took bum 'roids, it was a hoax, someone sold him saline solution for ten years. He shot it up thinkin' it was 'roids, he did his workouts, he did his training thinking the 'roids were making him stronger when it was really just his workout schedule. He improved a lot, made a career, eventually stopped using when the mlb started testing more, but always wrongly attributed his moderate success to the roids.

Dream Analysis, or Terror Quantified

This morning I woke up and remembered a dream I had. Not a dream from last night, but one from sometime in the past couple weeks. You know, you have dreams and you forget them, then for some reason you remember them days or weeks later. In my dream I was eating a Big Mac. I wasn't enjoying it. I remember putting the Big Mac back down in its box (this is where I put burgers when I need to take a "burger break") and feeling mildly stressed out because I still had about half of it left to eat (I'm still a die-hard member of the clean plate club, modern nutritionists be damned). It was a mildly stressful dream. If the unit of unpleasantness in dreams is the nightmare, this dream may have been about 1/20 of a nightmare. It is less exciting to have bad dreams this way, but I imagine I get more sleep at night.


In my waking life I very much enjoy the Big Mac once or sometimes even twice per year.


What does it mean?


After careful consideration, I believe the ambivalence towards the Big Mac in my dream is either:

a.) an unconscious expression of my real-life ambivalence towards the Hardees Thickburger. I love the Hardees Thickburger; however, I am horrified (to the tune of 1/5 a nightmare) by the cultural aura surrounding it.
-or-
b.) an unconscious expression of my real-life ambivalence towards Mark McGwire. I love Mark McGwire; however, I am horrified (to the tune of 1/5 of a nightmare) by the cloud of steroids-related controversy surrounding him.


I have boring nightmares.

sacrifice

I never thought in a million years I'd say something like this, but I'm uncomfortable with all this hate and vitriol directed at Roger Clemens lately. There's so many names to choose from, but even top sportswriters are getting in on this Clemens feeding frenzy. I think I figured out why the discomfort. I don't know if it's true or not, but I'm starting to suspect the media of using Roger Clemens as a white-guilt sacrifice to the gods of equality who'd call them racists when they bashed Bonds. He's being cast in the role of a reverse "great white hope"-- The One people had been waiting for to prove all these 'roid allegations weren't racially driven.

I'm not saying he isn't well cast. In this role it helps, as it does Bonds, to come across as an asshole. Nor am I saying it is such a bad thing to offer up such sacrifices. The gods are insatiable. And I'm most decidedly not saying I am now, or have ever, talked about such things through anything but my ass. I'm full of shit.

a wager

Say it ain't so, George. Cody McKay? Larry Bigbie?? Fernando Vina?!?



Ah, but at least there's a corn in the turd-- now I can say with a fair degree of confidence that I have bigger balls than Roger Clemens and Miguel Tejada. Wanna bet? I could probably fit seven of Barry Bonds' balls into just one of my balls-- even if I first put one of Jose Canseco's balls inside one of Roger Clemens' balls, then put Roger Clemens' ball-stuffed ball into one of Barry Bonds' balls.* But I'm not here to point fingers, and I'm not here to stuff hypothetical shrunken balls into other hypothetical shrunken balls. No, what I'm here for is to compare ball size, and the smart money's on mine. So go ahead, lay down your bets. Yes, put down some smart money. On my balls. Put money on my balls.


* Much like the Turducken.

sometime in the next twenty-five days...

This guy is gonna kill some heroes for lots of people. Before that happens I want to make some fearless predictions:


-Lots of pitchers, I bet, will be on there. Especially ones who were hurt (see Paul Byrd or, for that matter, Rick Ankiel). And I don't just mean the ones with that obvious 'roids look to them. In the category of my own worst fears, I have a dread that Chris Carpenter is gonna be on there.


-Lots of people you never heard of will be on there. And that's good. I've heard the argument put forth that it's even worse for someone like Bonds to do steroids, since he was good without them. To me, that's bullshit. The guy who uses roids and squeaks by should be dealt with the same as the guy who uses roids and hits 73 home runs.


-Either some doctors are gonna have to come out and truly stand behind the idea that HGH really does help in recovery from injuries (right now the only legal uses are for unusually short children, AIDS, and adult growth hormone deficiency), or that mythical excuse is gonna get blown wide open.



These are just predictions. I know that HGH isn't the same as steroids, and I know it was not yet banned by the MLB (though illegal in the USA) when some people took it. I also know it is a thorny issue when you come to performance enhancing drugs, and there are always new ones that aren't yet banned cropping up on the medical horizon. I don't even really know where I stand on the morality of it. But I do know where I stand in one respect: there needs to be a fair way to regulate, and with the humongous amount of money and resources available to MLB, the most obvious solution is simply to have mandatory random drug tests for every player, period. And just for the PEDs, mind you, I don't care about all the coke, weed, meth, crack, or even acid they might be taking, I don't think the MLB should concern itself about the baseball versions of Ricky Williams types. To me, random mandatory testing is the only way to avoid the witch-hunt scenario some people are against. It doesn't discriminate on talent, it gets the greats and the squeakers-by alike, and if we could get the MLB not to warn players when their turn was coming, it might even work.

the riddle of steel

Giants stole steel from Crom. Crom was angered. And the earth shook. Fire and wind came down from the sky, and killed the giants. Steel was left on the battlefield. Who found it? Not gods, not giants, just men. Learn the riddle of steel Conan. Learn its discipline. Only this can you trust, [points to sword], not men, not women, not beast. This you can trust.

These are the final words Conan hears from his father before his entire tribe is wiped out at the beginning of Conan the Barbarian. Judging by the magnitude of ass Conan goes on to kick, most viewers would probably agree Conan must indeed have solved this riddle of steel. But what the hell is the question, and for that matter, what the hell is the answer? And don't give me any of that "it's too complicated to put into words" bullshit. You're selling Conan short if you don't think he has the poetic skills to express the riddle of steel. When asked what is best in life, Conan's response is practically a haiku:

To crush your enemies,
have them driven before you and
hear the lamentation of their women.

Whatever the answer is, Conan keeps his mouth shut about it. Obviously he takes his father's advice to heart: killing men, throwing a woman into a fire, and punching a horse are all great ways to avoid trust. And he's always talking up good old Crom who, by the way, is of the earth. I don't think he buys James Earl Jones'-- er, Thulsa Doom's-- explanation that flesh is stronger than steel, either, and neither does the author of this amusing article on the subject).

So what is the riddle of steel? Hell, I don't know. I'll have to go check out some metallurgy books from the library and get back to you on that one.