Seriously, roids aren’t that big a deal. There I said it. Yeah, they make you big, they help you heal faster, and they probably help you hit a baseball farther. But you know what? Home runs are cool. I like to watch big sluggers. Big Mac was entertaining. Barry Bonds, when not being a horse’s ass, was fun to watch. Sammy Sosa probably took roids, definitely corked his bat, and yet I’d rather watch him hit, than, say, Edgar Renteria.
In the end, roids aren’t a huge concern to me. Yes, it’s cheating, but so is stealing signs, so is intentionally taking out an infielder with your slide, and so is scuffing a baseball–and those are all “accepted” (to varying degrees) parts of baseball.
But you cross the line from cheating into complete asshattery when you do what A-Rod has recently been accused of: Tipping pitches to opposing players. All those other things I mentioned? They’re all to help you and your team do better and win games. Which, at the end of the day, is what the game is all about. But tipping off opposing players? That’s just wrong, man. Yeah, so A-Rod supposedly did it only in blowouts when the game was “already over”. Nevermind that we’ve all seen ridiculous comebacks in baseball, so it’s hard to say when the game is “over”. But let’s just assume that’s totally true: Nothing A-Rod did affected the outcome of the game either way.
Even so, in your quest to pad your own stats (it is claimed this was done as a quid-pro-quo type thing with opposing middle infielders), you’re fucking with your own pitcher’s stats, man. At the tail end of a blowout, you probably have some young kid out there trying to show what he’s got to the manager, trying to put some numbers up to get his career going, and you’re being a shitcock by tipping off the batter and telling him what’s coming?   Or maybe some old veteran at the tail end of his career is out there, looking for one last contract before he hits the showers for good, and you’re going to ram it up his ass by telling the batter to look for the backdoor slider?
So I say A-Rod, if this is true, you’re even more of a douche than I thought.
I almost wrote about this myself. See, I completely agree with you about steroids — I don’t see how they’re any different from the spitball, really. They both involve using an outside substance to obtain results you couldn’t get otherwise, they were both used by a whole lot of dudes who wouldn’t have been half as good otherwise, in both cases the scandals were blown way out of proportion by the media (remember how deadly the spitball is?? OMG!), then they were both banned and baseball is probably better for it. So I can’t see being outraged about the steroid era unless you’re also outraged about the spitball era. And, I mean, get a grip.