A-Roid

Word on the Internets this weekend, to save Blogfrica from actually dealing with the NBA or Pro Bowl, is that Alex Rodriguez tested positive for steroids in 2003. At this point, the only authority you can trust on roids is, clearly, Jose Canseco.

As a blogger, you get two flavors of post about this.

1) A-Rod's a fraud! Let me spend the next few hundred words saying how I always knew this!

2) Every good player is on roids, so let's just make them legal now, and part of the strategy of the game, kind of like when a NASCAR guy chooses to change tires or fuel up.

Both tactics bore me, so here's a third tactic...

Who, in 2003, are we absolutely certain *wasn't* taking steroids?

Think it over. The best players in the game were clearly using them, without anyone seeming to care. Barry Bonds ruled baseball with an oversized head. The Oakland A's won the AL West with guys like Jason Giambi and Miguel Tejada. Sammy Sosa led the Cubs, Mark McGwire led the Cardinals, and the Marlins beat the Yankees in a relatively blah 4-2 World Series, after the Marlins-Cubs and Sox-Yanks both went to seven games. It was a great year for baseball, thanks to the overly dramatic playoffs. Sure, people were talking about steroids, but no one was really letting it get in the way of the games.

Alex Rodriguez was in Texas, leading the AL in home runs, spending the last of three seasons of futility in the heat.

Assuming that he was, in fact, guilty of going on the juice... I'm not all that sure that I'm going to feel terribly upset about it.

You see, the first person to cheat is kind of a trail blazer. They gain the biggest edge, take the biggest risk, and earn the biggest ire when they are caught. But with each succeeding cheater, especially when they cheating becomes common and/or outdated, the outrage is muted, and so is the urge to prosecute.

This is a tangent, but does anyone remember Douglas Ginsburg? He was the Supreme Court nominee made by Ronald Reagan in 1987 after the Senate bounced Robert "King Tut" Bork, and he got bounced for admitting that he used marijuana. Now, we've elected a President who has admitted to smoking it; admittedly, the President is chosen by the people, rather than the Senate, but one suspects that a Court nominee with a similar problem wouldn't be automatically rejected now. What's changed? Twenty years of people, well, using marijuana.

It's not quite the same thing, of course, since pot doesn't improve your athletic ability (unless Robert Parish owed his longevity to it, or it made Michael Phelps swim faster) in the same way that steroids do. But the principle is the same.

And the guys that weren't using in 2003 probably weren't, well, among the best players in the game. It just seems to be too much of an advantage.

Now, does this mean that we should ignore the possible cheating? Of course not; standards are standards, and the law is the law no matter how valuable the player or the color of his laundry. But if you are using this to feel morally superior to the Yankees, you might want to take a step back... because the simple fact of the matter is that your team probably has cheats on it as well...

And if it doesn't, maybe that's telling, too.

(Also, that we can just about close the Hall of Fame right now.)