I haven’t watched an inning of big-league baseball in 20 years, not since the greedy bastards called a player strike because they were only making two million dollars per-year-per-player rather than 20 million.
I’m boycotting ‘em, hurting them in the wallet, the only thing the greedy bastards understand.
Nevertheless, I still hear about all these home run records each year and ask myself, “how do they do it?”
A guy named, I think, Barry Bonds, hit his 600th homer and appears on the way to hitting a career 3,860 round-trippers.
How do they do it?
Easy! They cheat.
I was impressed initially with the 70-or-so one-season home runs Mark McGuire (not sure of the spelling of his last name and don’t respect him enough to look it up) hit a few years back…………..until I found out in a newspaper article he’d been taking a legal steroid. There was another guy whose name I forget who hit about the same number of home runs that year.
There hadn’t been anybody who equaled Babe Ruth’s 60 homers for decades before, with the exception of Roger Maris.
What’s happening?
Easy! A little guy in a lab, wearing a white scientist coat like Doctor Frankenstein, developed a pill to enhance physical performance.
The Babe, not only did he not take performance enhancing drugs, he took substances that were performance de-hancing. He’d stay out all night, get drunk, show up at the park the next day with a hangover and still hit three home runs.
Today’s athletes have achieved fame and money way out of line to their actual importance. If you criticize, people call you jealous, and maybe I am……….but with a twist.
I’m only jealous of real achievement, like the writing of the Gettysburg Address. Being able to swing at a ball with a piece of wood is something kids in vacant lots did for free a hundred years ago.
Today, winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing. Millions are at stake. You gotta cheat.
The star pitcher on one of those Chinese teams that come over every year to play our kids in the kid’s World Series was found to be a 24-year-old midget, probably on steroids.
There was a banquet recently for a hometown boy who’d become a big league ball player. He was as dumb as a fence post.
I was covering the event for the local newspaper.
“What do you want?” He asked suspiciously.
“Just a quick comment for the home town folks, on how it feels to be back home,” I said, apologetically.
Nearby, my boss, who had wallet envy, was also drooling over the baseball player’s girl friend, who’d come to the event inappropriately dressed in a black, low-cut gown reminiscent of what Morticia Adams would wear on the Adam’s Family TV show.
Forgive me for being non-politically correct, but she came off as being a white trash hillbilly carried away with her own self-importance.
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