Barry Bonds, You're Next

Jason Giambi of the Yankees has admitted to steroid use as recently as 2003, using injections, oral drops and creams provided by Barry Bonds' weight trainer to pump up his abilities artificially. If you've observed baseball in the last couple of decades, it wasn't hard to see how much bigger people like Bonds, Giambi, the Astros' Jeff Bagwell, the recently deceased Ken Caminiti and others suddenly got some time ago, and how much smaller almost all of them but Bonds and Giambi are these days. Caminiti, having wrung his body out for long, hard-partying years and admitted steroid used during his National League MVP year in 1996, died of a cocaine overdose earlier this year, and many of the people interviewd about him during the next week are obvious former steroid abusers.

I am thoroughly disgusted by Major League Baseball's unwillingness to squash this nonsense, but the rise in home runs over the last decade has been so popular, and done so much for baseball attendance and viewership, that I guess the league just figured we wouldn't mind the fact that all those records are so much bullshit, products of creative chemistry and not human effort. Experts often say that extra power isn't enough to hit home runs regularly, and it isn't. But an occasional shot of human growth hormone will make a warning-track out into a home run every time. If you've already go the eyes and the wrists, more power gives a real boost in performance.

So I view recent home run records as non-events. They didn't happen. And I won't watch baseball until I can look out on the field and not see relatives of the Incredible Hulk in baseball uniforms. Robots, sure. But not steroid-pumped humans. No thanks.