STEROIDS: WHO NEEDS THEM? ANSWER: ALMOST EVERYONE

Please be sure to check out Gideon's Tampa Bay D-Rays off-season report and team preview. The 24 reference was particularly impressive, so much so that I awarded Mr. Friedman extra points in my NCAA tourney pool.

As I write this, we're waiting on the rain delay in the Japan v. Korea semifinal. I will write my long column on the WBC very soon; suffice it to say I want Buck Martinez to serve as my butler for this miserable performance. Managing is far more important in this setting than in the course of the regular season or even the MLB playoffs, and Martinez sucked. But like I said, we'll get my full thoughts on the WBC very soon, and since I have been a WBC supporter before the idea for the tourney even existed so I'll be nice.

But this evening, my subject is steroids. To really talk about this subject, I have to establish my credibility. Except for Peter Gammons, who is the only baseball reporter not to play dumb on a regular basis, every major media outlet has been more hypocritical on the issue of steroids than Barry Bonds is for using them and then denying he did.

Like I said, I wish to establish my credibility on this issue. I remember tuning in for the legendary game in Busch Stadium where Mark McGwire passed Roger Maris to claim the home-run record. It only took one second to look at McGwire to know the guy was dipping his mozzarella sticks in chocolate sauce.

Yes, that is the euphemism I use for steroids.

I can already tell that my considerable fanbase (all of eight people) is saying, "Ohhhh, I get it. He's sticking it to the mainstream media for being hypocritical. Really, he hates steroids more than all of us."

Me 1, Fanbase...ZERO.

Now I realize that most people came to the steroid problem in baseball not knowing too much about the subject of performance-enhancing drugs. Old people were all like, "Are they Wheaties?" and baby boomers were like, "Can I invest in them?"

I happen to be a wrestling fan. Now I don't watch wrestling anymore, because any of the guys I cared about all died from drug overdoses in subpar working conditions, but when I did, it was pretty obvious that everyone was on steroids.

It's stupid for wrestlers to take steroids, but they had very good reasons to do so. If they didn't take steroids, they didn't look the way their boss (Vince McMahon, Ted Turner, take your pick) wanted them to. So to feed their families, they bulked up to look good on TV.

The difference in wrestling is, nobody pretends that wrestlers aren't all on steroids, except for possibly the government. But no one else is that fucking dumb.

Similar situation when I saw McGwire lift his little boy over his head. To really enjoy the moment, I either had to suspend disbelief -- which was freakin' impossible, the guy looked like Hulk Hogan -- or come to grips with the fact that doing steroids didn't hurt anybody but other players, and those other players weren't exactly in a hurry to crack down on this epidemic.

So I got over it. Athletes take steroids, big deal.

Flash to EIGHT YEARS LATER, when every reporter in the country is still whining about Bonds taking steroids, and Bud Selig is launching an "investigation." What a load of horseshit!

I mean, look at pictures of Bonds. Any idiot knew the dude was on steroids. He was like twice as big as himself in 1998. This does not happen by accident, retards.

Of course Sammy Sosa took steroids. So did Ivan Rodriguez, Palmeiro. The whole Texas Rangers were doing it. Jeremy Giambi taught his brother. And so on. Brady Anderson hit 50 homers. I mean, were people really rationalizing this stuff? We're still giving ex-users the Comeback Player of the Year Award!

I mean, this was seriously entering the realm of self-parody!

It would have been one thing if everybody agreed that steroids were bad from the get-go, and we didn't want them in sports. Then I would have been like, OK, get them out of sports. But when they singlehandedly revitalize the marketplace for baseball, I think they served their purpose.

If steroids were animate instead of just being drugs, they'd be like the girl you used to make the chick you REALLY want jealous. Then after you got the new chick, you were, "Bitch, I'm sticking an asterisk next to your name and don't ever call me again."

It's not cool to treat women this way. Fortunately, steroids are unlikely to steal your car or send you e-mail scams where you confess your secret crushes. Only women do those things. Well, women and robots.

My point is, steroids, I can't get mad atcha. You look good in a uniform, and you rake like a motherfucker.

If I was Barry Bonds, and some white dude was parading his baby son around on his massive pythons after shattering a decades-old record, I sure as HELL would have said to myself, "You know what, maybe I better start smoking this shit too."

Inevitably, the investigation of Bonds will result into nothing. And there is absolutely ZERO way this is keeping Bonds out of the Hall of Fame. Steroids or not, he'll be enshrined in Cooperstown, and rightly so.

Barry Bonds doesn't need my sympathy, but his drugs sure do.