who do we drug test? [a guest post]

Just like everybody else I’m tired of hearing about Alex Rodriguez’s steroid use or any of the player’s sordid stories. It is old and tired and disgusting.  But it occurred to me as I heard A-Rod’s lame excuse that the pressure of his newly minted $252 million dollar contract that pushed him to seek the performance advantage that steroids offered. Do you believe that? I don’t. But I also don’t believe baseball has cleaned up anything. We just aren’t testing the right people.  Did anybody check Tom Hicks’s blood? He was the idiot who bid against himself and gave Alex that big contract.  Why would he do that? Do rich people just get some kind of sick thrill from overspending and wasting money? A perverse sort of conspicuous consumption.  Maybe Tom felt the heat from the fans who wanted big stats and big championships.  Maybe we are all addicted to Big.

Remember how in the late 90s we were all so excited for Mark McGuire, Sammy Sosa and Barry Bonds to break those homerun records? We all wanted to see it.  Big numbers! It was funny how this was happening during the frenzy of dotcom excess which had its own story of chemically enhanced big numbers.  Not long after the dotcom bubble burst we really accelerated that real estate bubble. Big houses, big kitchens, second houses, more space, more, more, more and then big garages for big Hummers and other sick enormous vehicles. Houses on steroids, cars on steroids. Where does it end?

Musical chairs in the blame game. Alex didn’t want to take steroids but the contract made him do it. Tom Hicks didn’t want to make such a crazy contract but the fans made him do it. I guess it is the fans — the regular people — who are to blame. How dare they want the best millionaire ballplayers and not the merely good or (heaven forbid) mediocre? All the players are millionaires now. Once it was big news that the Yankees had a millionaire at every position. That was courtesy of the ultimate “Big Addict” George Steinbrenner. More bigger, better, right now. That was George.  Did George and Tom get drug tested? How about the Yankee fans, should we test them?  Baseball salaries  are ridiculous and baseball owners are the primary perpetrators. They turned America’s pastime into an unaffordable luxury outing.   Maybe it is their fault that the rest of us needed big houses and cars. We can now blame baseball owners as much as “poor” A-Rod for the current financial crisis.

Maybe none of this matters. Baseball is smaller now, and there are fewer homeruns. Pretty soon the parks will be empty because everyone is unemployed and can’t afford to go to games. The big houses are foreclosing and the Hummers sit unsold, decorated  with 50% off signs. Big is coming to a screeching halt, collapsed under its own weight.

We are at the End of Big.  The banks had their own designer steroids called %*#$&@%$&! bonuses. Those are gone now, along with all the other easy money, homeruns and toxic mortgages.   Steroid monitoring at this point is like fighting  the last war. It’s over.

All we ever had to do was take away the ultimate steroid: easy money!!!!

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