If we’re being honest with ourselves, it’s pretty obvious now that almost every great baseball moment between 1998 and 2007 was somehow affected by steroids. McGwire and Sosa obliterating a 40 year  old home run record that some said would never be broken, and Bonds making Roy Hobbes look like a 4th outfielder for a few years are the obvious examples, but now it seems pretty clear that the great Yankee teams of the late 90′s and the legendary 2004 Red Sox were also chemically enhanced (we just don’t know the extent).  My question is who’s fault is this? Bud Selig and MLB? of course. Donald Fehr, Gene Orza, and The Players Association? Without question. But what about the rest of us? Why do we get a pass? The fans and media members who are currently outraged that these players would dare cheat at our nation’s pasttime were the same people who were lionizing McGwire and Sosa, and writing freakin’ poetry about the ’98 Yankees or 2004 Red Sox. Sure, everybody questioned Bonds immediately, but that’s because he’s a dick and no one likes him, it didn’t exactly take Woodward and Bernstein to turn the country against him.

Let’s go back to 1998. McGwire looked like the love child of the Brawny man and the Incredible Hulk. He had such bad acne on his neck that had HDTV been around, they may have had to blur the screen. Seal had better skin in 1998 than Mark McGwire. Meanwhile, his asshole friend Sosa had gone from an underrated speed/power outfielder to a square shaped man who was hitting 20 homeruns in a month.  Everyone knew something was up. I was 12 years old and I knew something was up. These guys looked anything but natural, and they not only broke Roger Maris’s record, they took it out to the backyard and raped it repeateadly. What did we do? Did we demand someone put a stop to these giant men defiling our sacred record books? Were there organized protests everyday outside Wrigley and Busch? No, we flocked back to baseball, a sport that had screwed us out of a season just 4 years earlier. We couldn’t get enough. Sports writers penned stories about these men like they were folk heroes (I always thought Paul Bunyan juiced so I guess there’s a precedent for that), commentators waxed poetic about the chase like it was the goddamn moon landing (for the record, Neil Armstrong-clean, Buzz Aldrin- also clean unless you count crystal meth), and that stupid hand gessture thing Sosa used to do became more popular than the Macarena. So of course, tons of other guys started using. This was their livelihood and they watched as these two guys, who were so obviously cheating that they might as well have been injecting themselves in the on deck circle, became gods.  The fans loved these guys. The media loved these guys. Major League Baseball seemed to love these guys. In terms of PR, there seemed to be no negative side to using steroids. And the fame and fortune certainly outweighed any potential health risks to a twenty something athlete. Imagine you’re a 23 year old kid who was plucked out of the Dominican at 16 because you could hit a baseball, you have no other discernible skills and barely even an education, it’s either succeed at baseball or accept poverty, are you really going to stay clean just because you have too much respect for the game? If Mother Theresa could hit a 90 mile an hour fastball, I guarantee you she would’ve put down the leper baby and started sticking needles in her ass. Give me a fucking break. Baseball did a shitty job of policing itself, but we stood by and watched like assholes, ignoring what was right in front of our faces. And now we’re the ones who got screwed? Get over yourselves, people. I’m going to remember this generation of baseball players as the group that was willing to trade their testicles for 15 homers a year, because if that’s not dedication then I don’t know what is.