Juice Them Up!

Juice Them Up!

 

Baseball season opens this week and I find myself being a bit nostalgic for the old days. I never wanted to be one of those old guys talking about how things were better when I was younger.

“These guys are nowhere as good as the players I used to watch.”

Problem is, you can’t argue with me about that statement. Guys were way better twenty years ago, it’s not even close…that’s because they were all on steroids!

I miss those days. Guys would come out of the dugout and be twice the size of the other players. When they batted, it looked like King Kong holding a twig. There was always a chance they were going to hit a screeching liner up the middle and leave a hole in the pitcher’s torso. Just like it happens in the cartoons.

Up until the late nineties, only two guys had hit more than sixty homers in a season. The first was Babe Ruth. If you’ve ever seen a picture of the Babe, you know he wasn’t using performance enhancing drugs.

The second was Roger Maris who did it in the sixties before anybody was taking steroids. Players were more into amphetamines then. Amphetamines don’t make you hit the ball farther, they just make you annoying to be around.

In the late nineties, there was a chance anybody could hit sixty homers in a year. Even if they only hit two the year before.

You knew who the guys were because of how fast they would grow in the offseason. It wasn’t just their bodies either. In his late thirties, Barry Bonds head grew like the Grinch’s heart, right before he lifts the sleigh.

Games were more exciting then. Balls were flying out of the parks and going farther than they ever had. Would you rather see a well-placed bunt or a ball leave PNC Park and cross the Monongahela?

Would you rather see a nothing-nothing pitchers dual or Roger Clemons in a roid-rage throwing part of a broken bat at Mike Piazza as he ran toward first?

I propose the commissioner of baseball make a move to bring steroids back to the game. It’s not cheating if everyone does it…Oh sure, you can say

“But it’s illegal.”

Who doesn’t do at least one illegal thing every day? Ok, I might be the wrong person to answer that.

If you don’t want to just jump right back into the steroids era, we can start gradually. The first year, only guys that suck can take them.

“You stink, so the league says you can take steroids.”

This could be beneficial with those players the Pirates always try to salvage from another teams scrap heap. You know the guys where GM Neil Huntington says,

“There’s something about him we really like.”

Yeah, his low ball contract.

So let’s juice these guys up and make the games interesting again. When I’m sitting at the ball park eating my nine dollar hot-dog and washing it down with a fourteen dollar beer, I want some action. It’s not so bad when the Pirates lose if I see ten long home runs and three fights.

Hey, when it was the Christians against the lions, you knew the lions were going to win…they always won. Unlike the NFL Lions…Still, it was always sold out. Why? It was entertaining.

“Fourteen dollars for a beer…somebody better hit a hole through a guy.”