Baseball, hotdogs, apple pie, and HGH.....Wow, I cannot believe that the cable news stations have been covering this story all day long.  Are we really to believe that the findings of the Mitchell Report come as a surprise to anyone at all? 

As a former baseball player at a highly competitive level (many of my friends went on to the bigs after college), I had intimate knowledge of Steroid use by college and professional athletes.  And guess what?  All of you do too!  It doesn’t take an MD to see that Sammy Sosa, Mark McGuire and Bary Bonds have used them!  They are all gorillas!  There is nothing natural about how they look-NOTHING-but there is a major reason for the use of these drugs.

Lets talk about professional sports in general.  And I am going to make you see why this type of thing is necessary, and why these morons are going to ruin the game by making the professionals stop using HGH, steriods, etc.

The average professional athlete (sans the PGA, LPGA, and Bowling) lasts in his/her profession about 10 years.  We call pitchers in the Big Leagues “old” at 35.  Now, I don’t know about you, but when I was thirty five years old, I had just had my first child and felt young-very young.  But I wasn’t throwing a 7 ounce ball 5,000 times a week as hard as I could.  I know dozens of pitchers who can’t hold a glass of water with their throwing hands.  And those guys never made the bigs. 

Pro football players take a beating every day, seven months a year.  They get the hell beaten out of them day-in and day-out and they really don’t complain.  A lot of casinos and illegal book-making operations make a lot of dough on them when they play.  The NFL is a multi-billion dollar industry-as are most of the professional sports.  While these football players make a lot of dough-watching CNN for fifteen minutes a day for the last six months, you had of seen the news on how many ex-NFL players are invalids at 45 because of the destruction done to their bones, joints, and ultimately their nervous systems.

Now, with that background, you must think about the amount of people who are actually good enough to play pro sports.  It is under 1500 in the NFL.  So, to stay competitive and HEALTHY long enough to reach the end of your contract you have to do whatever you can to perform every day.  Steroids not only make you bigger/stronger, but they also help you heal faster.  So, you go out on a Sunday for two hours and have 300 lb monsters try to tear your head off, and you have seven days to shake all the bruises, hairline fractures, and muscle strains before you go to the next city to have another group of eleven of the same gorillas beat you half to death.....This goes on for 20 weeks straight.  You don’t heal completely without HGH and Steriods.

Now, consider the fact that all the kids in this country look up to all these guys-and when they are hurt the franchise doesn’t sell as many shirts with their name on them, and ultimately they become financial liabilities, and are cut from the team.  While I think a lot of them are primadonnas, I also think about the flipside, where these guys come from nothing, and suddnely are millionaires.  None of the leagues teach them how to manage their dough.  None of the leagues make them live up to the “morals” clauses in their contracts.  So, they are left to fend for themselves, and all the while it hangs over their heads that a simple knee injury takes all that away from them-all that they have worked for for their whole lives.  And lets face it, there are only so many color-commentator chairs in the booth-so most of them won’t get a cushy broadcasting gig when they are forced to retire. 

Back to baseball.  Far more competitive than football, and it is far more difficult to excel in.  It is very close to impossible to keep your head in a 9 inning ball game when you don’t get a single ball hit to you in right field..I digress.  The point is, in a game that is so competitive that there are 5,000 guys riding around the US, Mexico, and South America, 12 months a year playing minor league ball.  After a year or two of that, you either Roid-up or you quit.  Because no one wants a life like that.  So they do it.  And they go to the bigs, and the competition to play is immense, and the possibility of getting an Alex Rodriguez-sized contract are 1 in maybe 100 million-so you do what you have to do.  These guys are human beings, but are expected to perform like they are above humans in the food chain.

So, the next time you want to put an asterisk by anyone’s name in the record books-remember you will have to asterisk entire seasons for some teams, like the yankees where their two star pitchers have used roids-and you will have to put an asterisk next to the entire NFL for the last 25 years.  And if you take the steroids out of the games, you are going to stop paying 200 bucks to go to a game, because they are going to be really, really boring thereafter.

We the fans have put these guys in the position to need steriods by virtue of being Fan-atics!