WHO DID THE STEROIDS? A DE FACTO GUIDE

Why do I keep writing about the steroids controversy? Simple -- God made it to entertain us. Or at least, that's what Dan O'Dowd told me when we shared that bowl of Fruit Loops.

-- Me, while writing this column.

During the era which liberals call McCarthyism and or "The Red Scare," Performance Analysis was but a shiny spermicle in the testes of a Polish immigrant. My grandfather Abe was a committed socialist himself, and as such he was hardly sympathetic to Joe McCarthy. In fact, he hated the bastard.

So if I didn't hate Bud Selig, how could I live with myself?

Answer: Get a grip -- my grandfather was poor, and I'm spoiled.

If I criticize Bud Selig, I have to criticize every rich white hypocrite who makes billions off of the labor of black athletes and then wastes the time of the United States Congress persecuting his charges.

This might be almost...racist.

Now, I know what you're saying.

"You went to Brown!" or, alternately, "Your dad is a periodontist!" Both rejoinders are besides the point, though I won't waste time disputing their veracity.

If you're not going ad-hominem, then my guess would be that your carefully considered response is, "Just because they're only going after the black people doesn't mean..."

Then you kinda stop yourself. You say, "Wait a second -- they are only going after black people." This is what Scientologists refer to as a Class-D breakthrough. (For those interested, a Class E breakthrough is an orgasm. See what you can learn from the internet?)

Barry Bonds did steroids, and anyone who suggests otherwise is a fool. So did Sammy Sosa, Mark McGwire, Brady Anderson, Ivan Rodriguez, Jose Canseco, Rafael Palmeiro, Mike Sweeney. After you hit the bong, you can name innummerably more who did the same. The Steroid Era may not be the industry-wide schlepping (technical term referring to the injection of steroids) that some fear-mongers want it to be, but yeah. Steroids got done. A lot.

Since I have never publicly offered a solution to the steroids problem -- this might have been because no one was dumb enough to ask me, I grant you -- I want you to know that what follows is a view borne of experience, not innocence.

The industry that provided me with this experience is one that doesn't get covered a lot by the mainstream media. When it does, the inaccuracy of the reporting tends to boggle the mind. The industry I am referring to is professional wrestling, and now that there is only one company with a salaried workforce, let's call it WWE.

Now in wrestling, every money-making scheme gets started when the promoter starts thinking to himself -- "X would draw a huge house." The 'X' in this equation is usually "Flair vs. Steamboat" or "Warrior vs. Hogan" or "Bob Sapp vs. anybody who isn't good enough to beat him and take away his aura."

I can't resist a sidebar discussing the beast Bob Sapp. Sapp is a former NFL wannabe who went over to Japan and made a small fortune drawing Japanese crowds to see him punk tiny opponents with his massive hands. Sapp's gimmick was that he would eat a banana after the match because the fans loved it. This is just to say: America isn't the only country guilty of exploiting black athletes.

But back to what draws crowds: sometimes it's T & A. God knows before Bud decided to look the other way, he probably considered that. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if it came down to Tiffani Amber Thiessen topless at every major league stadium or "look the other way." In either case, Bud was thinking like a wrestling promoter does -- if it draws the crowds, if it puts money in everybody's pocket, can it really be as bad as they say it is?

Yes, this was a different time in baseball. The memory of the strike was fresh in everybody's minds, though in my case I was mostly focusing on the innummerable autographs I was able to obtain from bored ballplayers with carpel tunnel syndrome and stagnant bank accounts. Thank you, Tom Glavine.

Something did have to give -- either baseball was going to become second fiddle to the Jordan-era NBA or it was going to bring back the audience it had lost by altering its game. And what better way to change the game than increasing the frequency of its signature play, the home run?

The major thing that Bud took from wrestling (subconsciously of course, Freud was the first true Performance Analyst) was that the quality of the performance was only noticed by the hardcore fan -- the rest were too busy coughing up big bills and watching home runs sail out of ballparks to notice.

The real lesson that wrestling provides in the case of steroids in baseball comes from the case of steroids in wrestling. Unlike his father (not the best guy either), Vince though the future of wrestling was in massively overmuscled guys, the only kinds of wrestlers he found believable. This whole fetish sprang from his own desire to become buff, one he indulged illegally through steroid use, probably to this day.

The wrestlers used steroids a lot more than baseball players, I think it's fair to say. Without a union to protect them, wrestlers bulked up or got fired, and stayed buff 365 days a year. Now so many of the steroid users are dead that it's most interesting to note the guys whose lives weren't users. (Ric Flair stands out.)

I'm not expecting this kind of death toll to hit baseball at all. The interesting question that this does posit though came to me once afternoon when I was listening to another one of my grandfather's endless tales about those salad days.

If baseball players did start dying from steroids -- or even simply being incapacitated in wheelchairs and nursing homes -- who would be to blame?

The men who put their lives in danger to save the game and provide for their families? Or the nasty profiteers who put the individual safety of the players aside for their own reasons?

"The employees usually get the short end of the stick," my grandfather told me.