The Boys of Baseball: Let 'Em Roid, Let 'Em Rage

So baseball players take steroids.

Who really cares?

Let 'em roid up, let 'em rage out, let 'em play ball.

After all they ain't airplane pilots, brain surgeons or heart docs.

If while flying your plane your pilot appears angry and muscle bound, walks about the aeroplane flexing his biceps and menacing passengers, then intentionally lands the plane roughly with a bad bounce, bounce, bounce then, my friend, find another air line outfit.

Your pilot just might be in the midst of a steroid rage.

Or worse yet be worried about the air traffic controllers being baked. Remember "Airplane" and air traffic controller Steve McCroskey:

Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit drinking.

Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit smoking.

Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit sniffing glue.

Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit amphetamines.

Worry about that.

But if Big Papi is popping steroids who really cares? His job is to bash a ball with a bat not operate on a brain.

Let' em guzzle race horse 'roids, wicked whiskey, cheap beer, high grade cocaine, and piles of amphetamines.

Add some firearms, some high grade party girls, a hair band soundtrack and you have the 1986 New York Mets.

I mean what's the problem? They play a kid's game for millions.

And if your kid really needs a role model and he looks towards a baseball player show him an astronaut or a staff sergeant.

Not Manny Ramirez. The wheels still turning but the hamster in his head is long dead. Skip A Rod and Madonna and google a Space Shuttle Captain.

Baseball players should run, hit, and make reasonable attempts at stopping a bouncing ball from hitting the ground or leaving a dirt field to roll into a grass field.

A frothing frost giant could play first, a steroid soaked silver back could swing a telephone pole as a baseball, or a bad ass bug bear could fire hundred mile an hour fast balls for all most fans care as long as their team wins.

What's the harm except to the players bodies and minds?

Did the Romans care about their gladiators or the barbarians and beasts they battled?

No the Romans did not. We are based on Rome so let the baseballs go out like gladiators.

The steroid screaming is nothing but sound and fury signifying nothing to paraphrase an old sports fan.

If they wish to trade healthy years, or decades, on planet earth for a few home runs and a million dollar contract let them.

Inflated batting averages have their price.

Some prices  are worse then man breasts and shrunken man parts.

But if an adult male wants man boobs to place some speed on his fast ball or hit another dozen home runs who are we to stop them? Its a free country if a man wants man boobs well then Bubba go get them.

Jim Bowie and Davy Crockett died at the Alamo for the right of Americans like Roger Clemens to buy boobs, be free, and for liberty!

Worry about the mad eyed Texas truck driver wheeling for twenty hours straight, flying on meth and rolling tons of deadly steel down the highway, going ninety miles an hour with Hank Williams ghost wailing sadly about a lost highway.

Worry about the men with their hands on nuclear weapons or man wiring your house swallowing magic mushrooms by the score.  

Cops on steroids are more frightening then shortstops.

Most infielders don't pack heat.

Worry about the drugged ferry captain, the tipsy bus driver, the rage filled steroid crazed cop with the hand cannon, or the tired train engineer trying to stay awake.

Remember that old train tune?

Driving that train, high on cocaine,
Casey jones is ready, watch your speed.
Trouble ahead, trouble behind,
And you know that notion just crossed my mind.

Take out train add Yankees and change Jones to Stengel and the song doesn't remain the same.

Because no one would have cared if old Casey Stengel had been driving the Yankee train while high on cocaine.

Fear not though Yankee faith-full Casey was driving that Yankee train high no bourbon and beer.  But so were most of those Yankees.

Every time he pitched Whitey Ford sweated out a pint of pure Jim Beam. The Mick and Billy were beer besotted.

But no one really cared. Certainly not Casey who enjoyed tipping a few.

Steroids of course are different. Booze degrades your physical abilities steroids enhances them.

But so what baseball is after all just a past-time, right?. They are, in the end, just entertainers. Well paid ones but entertainers nonetheless.

The baseball purists will say what of the records, what of the game?

When, if ever, was baseball ever pure.

Steroids and speed have been in baseball a long time. Drugs, drinking, and baseball make up American past-time stew.

Still the records stand.

Pittsburgh Pirate Dock Ellis pitched a no hitter under the influence of LSD did baseball drop that record since Dock thought Dick Nixon was the home plate umpire and he was pitching at Jimi Hendrix swinging his screaming electric guitar as a bat?

"The ball was small sometimes, the ball was large sometimes, sometimes I saw the catcher, sometimes I didn't. Sometimes I tried to stare the hitter down and throw while I was looking at him. I chewed my gum until it turned to powder.

I started having a crazy idea in the fourth inning that Richard Nixon was the home plate umpire, and once I thought I was pitching a baseball to Jimi Hendrix, who to me was holding a guitar and swinging it over the plate.

They say I had about three to four fielding chances. I remember diving out of the way of a ball I thought was a line drive. I jumped, but the ball wasn't hit hard and never reached me." From LSD and the No Hitter.

I'd wager Dick Nixon had a short temper and a savage strike zone...and pitching to a player playing Purple Haze?

All the Pirates needed was White rabbit playing through the stadium sound system for the entire game. Well maybe it was running in Dock's head.

But did baseball throw out the Cincinnati records because Pete Rose had the Reds and the over 7 1/2 runs parlayed most games?

No, neither did they drop those Met records from the eighties. The eighties, like Randy "the Ram" Robinson said, rocked. Ask the Mets.

Sure there are casualties like the fictional Randy the Ram and Darren Daulton patiently awaiting the Mayan End Times and a Doctor Strange like astral blast off from this wicked old world in 2012.

Everything has its costs. Buy the tickets take the ride like the good Doctor Gonzo once wrote.

So if baseball players want to fuel up on whatever floats their boat and raises their level of play why not let them.

It is after all just a game, not real life.

Do fans care what substances their movie stars, singers, strippers, song writers, and writers take?

Or what their clowns, prostitutes, porn stars, and politicians take?

Baseball players are mere entertainers on a stage not people involved in real life and death.

Play Ball!

The key word being play.