by W.H.

Barry Bonds, Alex Rodriguez, Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa & Rafael Palmiero: 3076 combined home runs, 91 combined seasons, 1 World Series title. 1 freaking championship. Assuming their proportions are standard, they individually own more juice shrunken testicles than their collective total of World Series rings. Can we let these bastard idols die in peace?

The hysterical media hype surrounding every moment of these accused cheek-needlers stems from one agenda: baseball writers, talkers, and alleged journalists want to polish the “Juice Era” of baseball until every statistical number can be categorized as artificial or real. But you can't polish a turd and no historical numbers in baseball can be compared across eras.  The bottom line is that they didn't break any rules because nobody in baseball wanted to rock the money ship.  The fans didn't care when they filed through the gates, the owners didn't care when they raked in the cash, the players didn't care when they inked their new deals.  Every turned their backs to the obvious including the press.  And now we want to turn history on its side for the sake of preserving the integrity of the game?

Official Major League Baseball statistics encompass periods where the season was shorter, the pitching mound was taller, the fences were further away, great players lost four years of their prime to fight a war, there were no west coast road trips, and the balls were not wound as tight. Nothing has ever been standard in baseball other than nine inning games. There can be no rational justification for the “Juice Era”, but at some point we must trudge ahead and let the past be what it is: past.  MLB's all time hit leader has has been banished for gambling, a World Series has been influenced by mobsters, another has been erased by a strike, and the color barrier was the most damaging of all baseball's atrocities.  There are plenty of ghosts in baseball lore but the haunting lessens as the years go by.

He lost three prime years to the war, didn't go to college, and never used juice to live up to expectations

We will never know all of the facts. We will never know how far down the rabbit hole this issue went. Some players will escape public criticism, but may suffer from private guilt and the irreparable harm that they've caused to their bodies. As the most visible leaders from the business side of their sport, Bud Selig and Donald Fehr should resign regardless of their incompetence or because of their deception. Whether the problems were their fault is irrelevant, what matters is the damage done to their product's image. It would not be cutting the head off to spite the face. It would be akin to chopping the tail off of a gecko and hoping the new one would be better suited for rising above where the shit comes out.

The media needs to recenter itself on the games being played instead of focusing on how people react to A-Roid. Yankee fans boo Rodriguez during the regular season, they boo him when he takes his shirt off in the park, they boo him when he's interviewed by the media, they boo him whether he's taking a crap in the john or in the post-season. They boo him when he's fucking rocking out to “Lucky Star” on his iPod... wait, he probably has a Zune. Regardless, Yankee fans are a miserable lot who would heckle Mother Theresa if she healed Don Zimmer after Pedro Martinez cracked his skull. They're the prep-school girl that cries when she gets a Lexus on her sweet sixteen, because she's used to getting railed in the back of Audis.

That must come natural with expectations of greatness. When you win 25% of all of your leagues championships you get cranky when things don't turn out as expected. It's perfectly acceptable to do irrational things like beg for the firing of one of the best coaches in your franchise's history, and hate one of the best players in the game. But does any alleged sports network need to glorify the fickle crowd's reaction to the newest felon in baseball's spring training at bats? Does any radio broadcaster need to emote while discussing A-Rod's cousin? He didn't tarnish the legacy of the game with his inflated stats any more than Major League Baseball tarnished it's record books when it added 18 games to the schedule, or lowered the mound, or moved the walls in. When Roger Maris hit 61 home runs in 162 games Yankee fans wanted to kill him too, and he helped them win two World Series. That's one more championship than Rodriguez, McGwire, Sosa, Bonds, and Palmiero combined.

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