Steroid Sham (Beck)

Please allow me to re-introduce myself: my name is . . . Beck. I’m a punk from L.A. with the je nais se quois to make your eyes bleed from epiphanic insight into every aspect of human existence, but sports is the perfect arena to make cowards mumble. And if you don’t like multi-syllabic words, then follow Bun B’s advice from Jay-Z’s classic “Big Pimpin’” and “go read a book, you illiterate son of a bitch, and step up your vocab.”

Alex Rodriguez. What is there to say? You’re 33 years old, you signed the most lucrative contract in the history of sports playing on the most-storied team in baseball, and you won the MVP award three times. You were 20 years old when you played your first full season, in which you hit .358 and belted 36 home runs. Since then, you’ve become the youngest player to hit 500 home runs, breaking Jamie Foxx’s record that stood for almost 70 years, and you’re easily poised to break Barry Bonds’ all-time home-run record of 762: for your career, you average 42 home runs per year, and sitting at 553, you’d only need to play 5 more seasons, putting you at 38 years old. That’s not young for baseball, but it’s also not a dig-me-out-of-the-ground fossil either. Hell, when Barry Bonds was 38, he hit 45 home runs and took home the MVP.

But that’s precisely the problem, isn’t it? You tried to play your career as antithetically to Bonds and the other steroids-users of the ‘90s as possible; people had pinned their hopes on you as being the “clean” player who, in a few years, would take the most-hallowed record in sports – the Home Run King – away from a known-cheater, but you couldn’t pull the plank out of your own eye. And now you’re being compared to the same swindlers that sat in front of Congress and “refused to talk about the past” or stuck their finger out and absolutely, positively denied ever taking steroids. And though we know the guy is penniless and willing to out anyone he’s ever had contact with, Jose Canseco claims he introduced you to a dealer in his 2008 novel “Vindicated: Big Names, Big Liars, and the Battle to Save Baseball.”

Well, I hope your testicles haven’t shrunk to microscopic proportions yet, because by your own admission, and my count, you’ve been on the juice for the past 8 years. You can try to fool whoever you’d like to swallow that you only used from 2001 to 2003 when you were on the Texas Rangers, but let’s be real here. In 2003, the year you tested positive, the MLB did not even PENALIZE players for their first positive test, and you said you weren’t even contacted about the results until 2004, and even that disclosure was vague. You claim you stopped after that, once you’d been signed by the New York Yankees, which just so happened to be the first year the MLB began punishing players for failing the piss tests, and even then the MLB admits that they had no way of testing for human growth hormone (HGH). How many players simply switched from ‘roids to horse-pills whenever it became suddenly more convenient? And how are we ever supposed to believe a liar?

Your legacy is gone, A-Rod, and you probably don’t have a snowball’s chance in hell at being enshrined in Cooperstown. Mark McGwire received only 21.6% of votes from HOF voters, and that was actually down from the year before, his first year on the ballot. In case you forgot, 75% of the vote is required before they hang your bronze bust on the wall. And by my estimation, you’ve got 364 home runs to explain, leaving you with a meager 189 home runs from 1995-2000 that weren’t undeniable tainted. You might as well quit now, because you won’t repair your image well enough for people to ever forget this kind of transgression. See, the public has a contract with its athletes, and in return for providing us endless entertainment due to your supreme athletic skills, you have to assure us you’ve done it without cheating. You’ve broken the only rule that matters – besides not leaping into the stands to punch us in the face when we throw beer at you, a la Ron Artest – and for that you’ve got to pay the price, sooner or later. My grandma always said that you have to sleep in the bed you made, so have fun. Hope those gold-plated sheets keep you warm when the acceptance you so desperately strove to achieve has been decimated by your own apology. May your balls shrivel and your man-boobs grow.

And Bud Selig, you’re not off the hook. You should go out back and take care of yourself like Old Yeller. You survived the 1994 strike that eventually canceled the World Series, which was the first time it hadn’t been played in 90 years, and you needed a way to draw fans back to baseball. Back to America’s national pastime? That’s terrible! Your league was failing compared to the NBA – skyrocketing after Magic and Larry in the ‘80s and now Michael Jordan – and the NFL, which hosts the most popular event on television every year: the Super Bowl. So what did you do? You turned a blind eye for nearly 15 years and let home run totals shoot through the roof, and thanks to the McGwire-Sosa race in the summer of 1998, you had America back on your side. However, your Faustian deal is coming back for payment, and the Devil won’t let you get away with this one in a second.

A friend of mine proposed that they should create a "steroids-only MLB" for all the users, and people can watch the league in good faith and not wonder if they're being cheated. It'll be a lot like professional wrestling, when Vince McMahon changed it from the WWF to the WWE (World Wrestling ENTERTAINMENT) because people already figured out it was fake. This could be the same way. Think about it.

- Beck