I wonder what line they’ll draw?

I mean Bonds was the last one to have that giant hard shell on his arm, right?

steroids are against the rules. Medical treatment isn’t. (Unless of course, it’s getting steroids to assist in rehab. For some reason, we bar athletes from complete medical treatment for their on the job injuries when in any other profession is cause for a law suit. I’m digressing.)

I’m the only person I know of to have said (yeah, yeah, only in blogs and such…) that there needs to be a serious study in the role of drugs currently classified as “PEDs” in rehabing players and that, basically, there’s some argument to be made that if they have a significant injury reducing capacity, they should be legal and widely used by physicians treating baseball players. I’m still digressing, aren’t I?

Before we go all crazy chasing after Alex Rodriguez and Barry Bonds and trying to erase their numbers from the record books, it might be a good idea to stop and ask ourselves, “why?”

If the use of steroids wasn’t illegal under federal law, I don’t think you’d being seeing so many people “go all crazy”. Steroids have been major issue in sports since, well we can debate the “when”…I’d go with since Ben Johnson but there are certainly incidents prior to that moment that brought the issue to the forefront.

Whether it be the International Olympic Committee, Congress, or the NFL/MLB, organizations and goverments view steroids as “bad”. That’s the message to society. And as long as that is the message to society then Bonds, A-Rod, and all the others that get caught with the proverbial needle, are going to receive scorn from the public.

While there are certainly reasons to suggest that steroids shouldn’t be view as “bad” (or differently that other medical and scientific advancement), I think the players themselves certainly do deserve the scorn that they receive; they know what the law is and they know what the public perception is.

The NY Times covered it a little while back.

Human bodies are archaic. It should be obvious by now. We need to rush our research dollars into improving athletic performance. Which might give Seattle’s military-medical complex an edge. We build extra-hard bodies nine ways. Minnesota and Baltimore would be good, too. Good research going on nearby. On the other hand, they are small market teams and might not be able to pay for adequate R&D. Johns Hopkins would sell its secrets to the Yankees, not the Orioles.

But eventually teams would want to have their own proprietary research, and they’d start drafting promising bio-chem kids along with the jocks. That would balance things nicely in your local high school. And then the stat guys would start measuring the effect a really good bio researcher can have on performance. Hey man, sure, that last batch was good, but small sample size, small sample size!

And steroids are so primitive. The bio-mechanical guys are going to get involved, because real arms are just not dependable — you spend a bunch of money on them and they blow out. And velocities top out at around 100 mph. You think that’s a fastball? That’s not a fastball! I think we’ve go bio-mechanics on this site that could break the sound barrier. Boom! Strike one.

Then again my onboard detection devices are pretty good. So that supersonic fastball is going to get rocked. Ballistic hard. Until they jam my radar. They are tricky, so tricky. We develop something, they counter. It’s always been like that. Always.

Each team is allowed one player who can do all the steriods he wants. Lets be honest, we all loved to see guys like Bonds and McGuire jacking home runs. By legally allowing one player, we can see a man-beast just destroy balls when he bats plus this way most players don’t need to sacrifice their health.