One of the most ignorant and irritating aspects of the steroid discussion engulfing baseball is the presumption of innocence that still exists with regard to certain players. How a person that knows anything about baseball could say,”This player did steroids and cheated; and my favorite player would never do that.” This idiocy was exposed to some degree last week when Ortiz and Ramirez were both revealed to have tested positive in MLB’s 2003 PED audit. And yet that attitude still seems to exist, as presented in a reader submission to GameOn, posted yesterday (emphasis added):

If a player is injured, or is just a contact hitter, then that player does not receive the love that the power guys do. Take Ken Griffey Jr., for example. He has had a great career but during the years that he was injured, he was largely dismissed by fans. Griffey did not take steroids to get back into the lineup like he could have. Instead, he let his body heal naturally. via.

There are two types of players in baseball right now: those that have reportedly tested positive, and those that haven’t. There is no “clean” or “dirty,” because nobody knows who’s “clean.” There’s no point in outing anyone as a “cheater” if we don’t know who didn’t “cheat.” How can you chastise those that failed when (a) there’s still the equivalent of more than three entire teams’ worth of players that failed the 2003 test, and (b) you have absolutely no idea who those players are?

This whole witch hunt is the only thing keeping baseball in the national consciousness. It’s time to pull the plug.

You’re not gonna believe this, but Sammy Sosa tested positive for the juicy juice. Sosa’s positive result from the baseball’s 2003 “practice” round of testing was leaked to the New York Timesby “lawyers with knowledge of the drug-testing results from that year.” Why the hell are all of these old tests from 2003 suddenly trickling out to the public?

for reasons never made completely clear, the test results were not destroyed by the players union and the 104 positives were subsequently seized by federal agents on the West Coast investigating matters related to the distribution of drugs to athletes.

The union immediately filed court papers alleging that the agents had illegally seized the tests, and over the past six years judges at various levels of the federal court system have been weighing whether the government can keep them. An 11-judge panel in California is preparing to rule in the case, but regardless of its verdict, the losing side is expected to appeal to the United States Supreme Court.

Wow, I don’t know if the game will ever recover from this. Even after this flunked steroid test and the corked bat exploding in 2003, nothing was worse than him bringing a translator to Congress in 2005. He speaks English! And that translator couldn’t stop him from Palmeiro-ing, either. Congress trying to bring “integrity” back to baseball. How laughable is that…

As Manny Ramirez finishes his 50-game suspension, the Dodgers are being warned to keep Ramirez out of the Dodgers clubhouse, so sayeth the LA Times. Ramirez spoke to media in the clubhouse on Tuesday, which is a violation of the 50-game ban he received for a positive drug test last month. But for those of you waiting for an explanation from Ramirez…don’t hold your breath:

“I didn’t kill nobody, I didn’t rape nobody, so that’s it,” Ramirez said. “I’m just going to come and play the game.”

He is eligible to rejoin the Dodgers July 3, and he can prepare for his return by playing up to 10 games in the minor leagues. He would have full use of the minor league clubhouse for those games.

Presumably, there isn’t much killing and raping going on in the minors. Not that it would be funny if there was. Unless it was one of Manny’s teammates, and then Manny came out of the closet immediately afterward. That would make at least one person happy.

Racing sensation and autographer of male breasts Danica Patrick was asked in SI this week if she would have taken any performance-enhancing drugs, provided that they would have helped her win the Indianapolis 500 and she would have avoided detection:

Danica, who finished third at Indy last month, said, “Well, then it’s not cheating, is it? If nobody finds out?

“Yeah,” she added. “It would be like finding a gray area. In motorsports, we work in gray areas a lot. You’re trying to find where the holes are in the rule book.”

That remark got her in trouble with the US Anti-Doping Agency, whose ass it is in your best interest to kiss when they operate with Gestapo-esque tactics with seemingly no oversight or appeal methodology. But none of that matters to columnists like John Smallwood of the Philadelphia Enquirer, who couldn’t play the Think Of The Children card fast enough.

[T]he biggest shame in kids thinking that they have to use illegal drugs to get ahead is that they see repeated examples of it working every day in the world of professional athletics.[...]

Rule books aren’t written in gray. The are written in crystal-clear black and white. Looking for loopholes and gray areas to bend, flex or stretch is called “cheating.”

I feel compelled to point out that Smallwood is African-American, but only because “Smallwood” is a hilarious surname for a black guy. But damn, son. This freaking country was founded on loopholes. And the great fallacy with the steroids witchhunt is that the only players that seem to be getting busted are the ones that piss off all the sportswriters. The testing process IS NOT black-and-white; nobody knows how it works, just as everybody knows that these tests are only catching the people stupid enough to get caught.

And the only reason kids turn to steroids is because kids are irrational and lazy. It’s the Contra Cheat Code for life. Pants down, shoot up, pants down, shoot up, left, right, left, right, B, A. Dirty lives, just like that. Alright, I’m off the soapbox now. Hey, what happened to all the soap that was in here? Read the rest of this entry »

Steroid testing paranoia has reached a fever pitch in Belgium, where the mere sight of doping officials at a bodybuilding meet caused competitors to flee and eventually forced the event to be cancelled. Thanks to OC for the heads-up. From the monolith:

A doping official says bodybuilders just grabbed their gear and ran off when he came into the room.

“I have never seen anything like it and hope never to see anything like it again,” doping official Hans Cooman said Monday.

During testing of bodybuilding events last year, doping authorities of northern Belgium’s Flanders region found that three-quarters of the competitors tested positive.

This begs another question: if everyone’s using, and everyone’s testing, why not just go clean? Forget about the merits of “not cheating” or whatever those prissy traditionalists are calling it now. If you didn’t use steroids, your competition has just been quartered. That’s a lot of logic for those Belgians, though. Though it doesn’t explain why anyone would pass on that delicious Belgian chocolate. Mmmm, chocolate.

An Australian jockey was suspended 18 months for handing off urine to another jockey to beat a drug test. Why are jockeys being tested for drugs? Does Australia just have a surplus of those little cups?

Queensland Racing Limited’s integrity counsel officer Allison Finlay, formerly with the Australian Crime Commission, told Halliday that Evans had conspired with jockey Donna Carrigg to deceive stewards by supplying an instrument containing his urine to be used as a substitution for hers.

That inquiry heard Carrigg was found by stewards to have in the arm of her riding jacket a tied condom filled with urine and containing a sharpened lollypop stick.

A lollipop stick? Just how many licks does it take to get to the center of a Tinkle Pop? Sorry, I’m just so grossed out by this whole thing. The only appropriate place to pass that sort of thing is in a toilet or onto the face of a sexual partner receiving cash. Service with a stream, I like to call it.

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