Steroids Won't Destroy Major League Baseball

Major League Baseball (MLB) has had lots of trouble keeping performance-enhancing drugs (PEDs) out of its ballplayers. These days, if a player tests positive for PEDs, he’s suspended for 50 games, the penalties getting much worse with each subsequent infraction. Hanging may be discussed at some date. Listening to Britney Spears CDs for a week straight would be horrific punishment as well!

Recently, Manny Ramirez, the 37-year-old outfielder for the Los Angeles Dodgers, flunked such a drug test. Shame on him! And damn his soul forever! If he needed to use a performance-enhancing drug, he should have tried Viagra! Hey, all he wanted to do was add another year or two to his waning career. You say Babe Ruth didn’t use drugs? But he sure ate and drank like, uh, Babe Ruth!

Alex Rodriguez or A-Rod, perhaps the greatest player in the game, and former players such as Barry Bonds, Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire have been implicated in the use of anabolic steroids. As for McGwire, who denies ever taking steroids, he admitted taking androstenedione or Andro, an over-the-counter muscle enhancement drug, which was legal for MLB players at the time he took it back in 1998. Some think McGwire will never be elected into MLB’s Hall of Fame because of his alleged use of steroids. Shame on him too!

The reason these players have taken PEDs is simple: money. Major League Baseball is a veritable money pit. Some players make over $20 million per year, nearly all of it guaranteed, and some of those are pitchers, who don’t even play every day. Why the owners ever agreed to pay players guaranteed money is beyond comprehension. You mean you’re gonna pay some guy millions of dollars for years even if injuries keep him from playing? This happens a lot. Ask Dodger Fans. Ask Yankee fans.

In order to pay for these exorbitant salaries, fans such and you and I must pay hundreds or even thousands of dollars for a ticket to one game. (Some seats at Yankee Stadium cost as much as $2,625.) At various ballparks, parking is $10 to $20 per vehicle, and you don’t even want to think about buying a beer at $6 to $8 a pint. For tens of millions of Americans, going to a MLB game even once a year is about as possible as dating Brad Pitt or Miley Cyrus.

So players cheat to be the best players they can be and therefore make the biggest bucks. And even though the penalties are now great, they will probably continue to cheat. Instead of taking testosterone, steroids or Andro, they’ll simply take human growth hormone (HGH), a test for the use of which has not been developed. It’s been stated that the scientists who invent these drugs will always be one step ahead of organizations such as MLB that test for their use. We'll see about that, right?

At any rate, please don’t revile players such as Manny Ramirez or Barry Bonds; instead, speak out against ridiculously high salaries and the sky-high prices we all must pay to see MLB players. Of course, we don’t have to keep going to these ballgames, do we? (Or paying for them on cable TV or the Internet.) Why don’t we just stop right now? That would end this “drug scandal,” if you will, fairly quickly. Ultimately, fans control the money.

Many fans left the game back in 1994 when the players refused to play the last portion of the season because they didn’t want to “turn back the clock” on free agency, the advent of which in the middle 1970s has dramatically increased salaries in baseball. All baseball fans will never forget what happened THAT YEAR. No World Series!!!

Simply put, if anything could end MLB it would be money, not drugs of any sort. Hey, if all players were on drugs, how would we know the difference? And would we really care?

If MLB must castigate all cheaters, maybe the cheaters should start a new league. There are beer leagues, why not a “juice” league?

Kidding aside, we know baseball players are not perfect people. They make mistakes; they cheat; they violate the rules. But we shouldn’t damn them to hell or shake our fists at them, because they are not the problem. As long as money remains the lifeblood of the game, we’re all going to suffer – at the ticket counter at least.

Of course, we could simply give up Major League Baseball. Give it up like a drug habit. Any takers?

Go ahead, it won’t cost a dime.