Destroy the Steroids Test Results. Do It for Baseball.

Steroids were the best thing that's happened to baseball in a long time.

With Sammy Sosa having been revealed as another of 104 players who tested positive for performance-enhancing drugs in 2003, we start another round of condemnation and speculation as to who's on the list.

We talk about asterisks, how steroids are destroying the game, and how players are now presumed guilty and left with the onus of proving their innocence.

It can't go on like this, with another high-profile player's name being revealed each month and the outrage starting all over again. It's this drawn-out, austere process that is destroying baseball by forcing us to talk about something other than the game that's being played.

We're left with two options.

The first is to reveal all the names on the list, dole out punishments as the league deems necessary, affix asterisks to all the records in question and brand every player who partook with a searing hot iron.

We'll forever wonder if we got everybody, and how those players would have played without the performance boost, reliving the outrage with each sportswriter's painful column.

The other solution is simple and elegant: Destroy the list.

Let me be clear that I do not condone steroid use, or even tolerate it. To cheat at professional sports is to be the weakest of all athletes, proclaiming one's self unwilling to go through the agony and torture of the work it takes to be truly great.

It takes a lifetime of no-holds-barred, unyielding dedication to be a professional athlete—that's why I'm not one.

At the same time, somewhere Bud Selig is quietly (very quietly) thanking Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa for juicing up. Baseball enjoyed a heyday it hadn't known in decades when McGwire and Sosa raced to be the home run king.

It was more than selling a few more tickets or a bump in merchandise sales. It was a cultural movement, a zeitgeist of anticipation and accomplishment and belief in the insufferableness of the human spirit.

The purists would always be there. But people who had never watched a full nine innings were now checking each day to see if Mark or Sammy had hit one out of the park that day.

Would the record be broken today? Tomorrow? It enveloped water cooler discussion more than politics, religion, and the weather combined.

When McGwire broke Roger Maris' home run record, it wasn't an individual accomplishment. We'd all done it together.

In a sport that had been troubled by strikes and lockouts, and had lost a sizeable portion of American mindshare to Michael Jordan and the glory days of the NBA, one thing becomes abundantly clear in retrospect.

Steroids saved baseball.

Not that baseball was going anywhere. Not that it wouldn't be popular now. But steroids made baseball fun to watch again.

And now it's a new era in baseball. There was no penalty for first-time steroid users in 2003, but Manny Ramirez can tell you that there is now.

With the ignominy that has overshadowed the sport from this whole scandal, we can be sure that the necessary steps will be taken to avoid it happening again.

The steroid days are, for the most part, behind us. Hitters are hitting a normal number of long balls again, and pitchers are showing their age. It's not as fun, but at least it's a level playing field.

Bringing the luster back to baseball means making a clean mental break, a reboot of the American mindset towards baseball. It has nothing to do with punishing offenders or earmarking records, and it has everything to do with making baseball fun again.

Recall that the list was the result of ostensibly anonymous testing. The fact that the testing was not double-blind (as evidenced by the players' names and results being kept together,) and that the results still exist in some form, speaks to it perhaps being a deception, that maybe it wasn't intended to always be anonymous.

The testing was held in the first place to determine whether it was necessary to institute random testing to discourage and penalize steroid users. They got their answer: Yes.

Now destroy the list.

Let the Steroids Era be an anomaly where players (legally, at the time) found new ways to succeed—and just as the NBA changed with the introduction of the shot clock, MLB can change with the introduction of strict substance rules.

Performance-enhancing drugs are a terrible thing, a terrible show of sportsmanship, and a terrible example for the kids.

But enhance performances they did.

And it was terrific to watch.