Cousin Bink's Country Beer Jamboree

Volume 1, Issue 4

Earlier today I got the latest issue of Sports Illustrated in the mail and I saw Albert Pujols staring back at me, telling me that I can believe in him. Now, I would hope a guy who I'm sure is paying as much as he is to advisers and agents wouldn't say something like this if there is a positive test result of him floating around from 2003, but to me that doesn't prove him to be innocent. I'm not going to say he's guilty and this guy's guilty, but the fact is that there's no way of knowing who did and who didn't except knowing for sure the guys that have come out and said they did.

Take Pujols for example. Albert Pujols made his major league debut as a 21 year old in 2001, which is the same year Bonds hit his 73 home runs and steroids were running wild. How many 21 year olds debut on opening day and play 161 games their rookie year? No September call-up the year before, start on Opening Day and play the rest of the way. I just looked that up and am completely amazed at that. Even if he didn't use steroids from the second he was signed by the Cardinals, which was in August of 99, whose to say that when he was trying out for scouts in the Dominican Republic one or two of them didn't slip him a little pill that would make his muscles twitch just a bit quicker?

I'm not just talking about Albert Pujols here. Pick a major leaguer from the past 15 years. Even if everyone of them said from the second I get signed to a professional deal I will never do steroids, which would be quite the moral high ground for some of these guys to set, what if a scout, or a high school coach, or a family friend (such as your Dominican cousin Yuri) just give you something that will help you for that one day that you're recovering from a long night?

And at this point should it matter? Outside of something remarkable happening, I'm pretty sure my favorite sports team ever will be the 2005 Chicago White Sox. Now, no one from that team springs to mind as a steroid user, but if ten years from now Jermaine Dye is down on his money and decides to get some cash by writing a tell-all telling how he and Joe Crede were shooting each other up, what does that mean? It was all for nothing? Time to start an old-fashioned Baptist book-burning and throw all the newspaper clippings, World Series hats, and MLB DVDs? You can feel free to, but I'm going to watch my Michael Clarke Duncan narrated DVD thank you very much.

I honestly hope the steroid era in baseball has been curbed, but I don't think it will truly be over for quite some time. The best scientists in the world are the ones making the drugs, and the ones testing are far behind them. Hopefully, MLB has done enough to at least get rid of some of these science experiments but if not what can you do? The 2001 World Series will still be ended by Luis Gonzalez freaky one year giant arms flipping a single over Mariano Rivera, Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa still drew fans back in 1998 and Roger Clemens is still a loud mouth hick, who deserves to just have one fastball beamed at his head once, steroids or no steroids.