I collected baseball cards from the day I was old enough to open a package to the day I discovered a different kind of package, and I never really thought about baseball cards after that. But as I sat down to write my last column of the semester, baseball cards were all I could really think about.
Over the past couple of weeks, we've heard reports of BALCO employee after BALCO employee claiming to have given steroids to the trainers of athletes ranging from Barry Bonds to Marion Jones. This week, the head of BALCO said that in some cases, steroids were given directly to the athletes.
Barry Bonds? On steroids? Hogwash! The most revered athlete in all the land, on steroids? A favorite in the clubhouse and at press conferences, on steroids? For the love of shrunken testicles, how could this be true? I mean, Barry's always been jacked, right? How could anyone think he's been shooting up to bulk up?
So I looked at my baseball cards. The results were not pretty.
It turns out that in his first few years in the league, Barry was about as ripped as Earl Boykins. And it's not just Barry. Sammy Sosa looked more like Bruce Banner than the Incredible Hulk. Mark McGwire is the most obvious. His rookie card looks like somebody at Topps accidentally inserted a picture of Tara Lipinksi.
I can't believe nobody saw this coming. With home run champion after home run champion getting overthrown like Latin American dictators, were people afraid to ask, or did they just not care?
Hockey revenues and ratings are in the toilet, football's biggest story -- even with Eli Manning's Elway-esque draft-day move -- is still a breast that's seen more surgeries than Dick Cheney's heart, and basketball playoff games are so spaced out that you forget who's even playing.
So why should baseball care? I spent an hour the other day trying to explain this problem to my baseball-ignorant friend (yeah, I know, obviously not a real friend) and by the end of the conversation, I just wanted to blow my brains out.
How can a sport cheat right in front of our faces and not suffer the consequences?
I tried to think of how such an obvious sham would look in other lines of work.
I pictured a kid having his friend take his oral exam for him. I pictured the CEO of a big company lying to stock regulators but advertising his lies in every newspaper in the country. I pictured a genocidal dictator telling everybody he didn't have any weapons of mass destruction while he built a nuclear reactor in plain view of TV cameras.
None of these situations could happen, of course. People would care. People would complain. People would know they're being lied to. But why not in baseball?
The players' union would never allow a ban that would go into effect immediately, because their members would need time to get clean or find a way to cheat the ban, whichever is easiest (wink, wink).
So what's the solution?
Voluntary testing.
One more time. Voluntary testing.
Every player that doesn't want to look like a scumbag -- every player that doesn't want an asterisk next to every single one of his statistics -- will get tested. Then every one of those players will post their results on their lockers.
Then after every game, when a reporter asks those players about the most recent BALCO accusation, all they have to do is point to their results. The players with the sheet will get the autograph requests. The players with the sheet will get the big contracts. The players with the sheet will have a clean slate for Cooperstown.
You think Barry will put up his results? Even Pete Rose knows the odds aren't good.
While I still have a few words left, I thought I'd turn to another asterisk, LeBron James and the Rookie of the Year award.
LeBron averaged 20.9 points, 5.5 rebounds, and 5.9 assists this season. Carmelo Anthony averaged 21 points, 6.1 rebounds, and 2.8 assists, and he took a team from 17 wins to 43, and a playoff berth.
Unless the Rookie of the Year award is secretly based on assists -- in which case Kirk Hinrich would win with 6.8 -- I can't figure out why anybody would vote for LeBron.
During Sunday night's Nuggets-Timberwolves game in Denver, ESPN kept showing LeBron in the crowd rooting for the Nuggets. I couldn't help wondering if King James would trade his Rookie of the Year award for playoff experience during his rookie year.
Call it greed, call it the A-Rod complex, call it whatever you want, but there didn't seem to be a lot of regret on LeBron's face.
Oh yeah, and if Nuggets owner Stan Kroenke fires coach Jeff Bzdelik, Kroenke deserves to go to franchise-owner hell with Al Davis and Marge Schott. Bzdelik has performed nothing less than a miracle this year, and he belongs at the end of the bench next season.
Well, that's all I've got for this semester. War the Rock Pile at Coors Field. War low humidity and high altitude. War a nice hot day at the ballpark with a nice cold drink. I'm out.
