It's time for a national professional wiffle ball league...strict drug-testing, if BAC is NOT over .08 then you are removed from the game...

but seriously, i don't mind baseball, as long as every record broken recently gets an asterisk, and they have to let Pete Rose into the Hall of Fame...because at least he wasn't juicing.

I'm not a sports fan, but I do think its important to confront any corruption in any organization, baseball included. The problem I have with this issue is that it involves some pretty high ranking people of our goverment... people who should be working on other issues like,say, the whole "Iraq War" thing or maybe the "there's still no cure for cancer" issue. You know, stuff like that.

Priorities, people, priorities.

As NASCAR showed earlier this year, there's more to cheating than drugs and human growth hormone.

Honestly, I think every tainted record should be expunged from the record books. For instance, all the Cy Youngs won by Roger Clemens? Let the record simply say, "Rescinded". All the games he pitched in and won? "Forfeit". The same thing with every other record or outcome. Make this so terrible that no player will dare risk this again.

All I noticed were the many many Baltimore Orioles, past and present, on the list.

And then I got depressed.

I think the bile directed at Barry Bonds over the last few years has been disgusting and I don't think his steroid use had much to do with his home-runs, except that it extended the length of his career. He was always an above average power hitter and he played in an era that witnessed increasing numbers of homeruns. And I don't think he was playing on an even playing field for the most part, given the number of other players also using steroids. But then again, I don't really care much about the purity of the record books either.

Anyway, I would love if the whole sports world was ripped apart by antitrust and labor laws and it devolved into an ad hoc series of tournaments played by teams made up of mercenary free agents.

I just don't care about baseball.

Now if it were the NFL... I'd be all up in arms.

er, I guess I really mean "I think Bonds was playing on an even playing field given that so many other players were doing steroids."

But that's a shitty ethical argument. The whole concept of ethics in professional sports is so bizarrely fucked up--I really can't stand the media's and average fan's desire to lionize players that live up to some perfect puritanical standard. Every time I see a player/coach applauded for being such a great guy that "never uses curse words" I see red (Tony Dungy and Shane Doan are the last two examples I can think of). This unrealistic attitude is so pervasive in sports that I fail to care anymore when real ethical problems rear their ugly head--like steroids, like Michael Vick, like Jon Amaechi--because the people in a position to deal with it are ethical midgets to begin with.

I think that it was as thorough as possible, but still hit-and-miss.

There are players, who, upon looking a their bodies (Ivan Rodriguez?) or their ballooning numbers from one season to the next, around MY suspicion, but are not named.

I also feel like there needs to be a smoking gun (needle?) in order to exclude any of these guys from the record books or the hall of fame. Those cancelled checks and delivery receipts work for that. In the case of Clemens, as much as I dislike him, we don't have that evidence, so he, rightly or wrongly, walks.

I used to adore baseball, but I'd already given up on it a few years ago. The exorbitant prices, the strike, and one of my favorite players showing his homophobic side just added up to one big "Ugh" every time I thought of the sport that I used to enjoy so much, so I quit following it. This report just confirms to me that, like mullacc says, you're dealing with corrupt people in a corrupt industry, and I'm not going to give them any more money or attention.

The problem I have with this issue is that it involves some pretty high ranking people of our goverment... people who should be working on other issues like,say, the whole "Iraq War" thing

I assume you meant to post this in the "Iran war" thread?