Prohibition

OH MY, STEROIDS, what a problem, what a nightmare in the world of sports over the past few years. Heaven only knows the steroid controversy has tainted sports, and the most tainted of all might be baseball, american style (if not cycling). Major league baseball, where the records and numbers are sacred, horribly tainted.

And now, because of steroids, all the wonderful marvelous records and statistics every baseball fan grows up learning to love are, or somehow seem, far less meaningful. Now there are two sets of numbers, those achieved by players not on steroids, and those by players on steroids, or performance enhancing drugs.

There no longer seems any reason to doubt that steroid use greatly improves a baseball player's performance, his statistics, presumably by growing and strengthening muscles. The most recent big name steroid violator to be caught, melky cabrera, spent several seaons in the major leagues, with the yankees, the braves, and the royals, and although he had tremendous athletic ability,

his offensive numbers never reached the level of a star. Then, quite suddenly, in twenty twelve, they did. Melky suddenly became a superstar, statistically, and i for one grew suspicious. His improvement was just too great, too quick, and too late in his career. Sure enough, he was tested, tested positive, and suspended.

I remember in late nineteen eighties when suddenly major league baseball players started showing up bigger...and bigger. I started thinking my goodness these new young ball players sure do a lot of weight lifting, and they sure do hit a lot of home runs. (How naive i was...)

The offensive numbers, especially homeruns, increased so dramatically in the late eighties and early nineties, with even small players with no previous signs of power suddenly becoming power hitters, everyone was speculating that there was something different about the way baseballs were being manufactured,. Maybe baseballs were becoming more lively, bouncier, carrying longer distances.

Extensvie tests on the baseball were even done. The results were inconclusive. We understand so much more now. And seemingly performance enhancing drugs have been purged from sports, thouh you hear many opinions to the contrary.

We have set foot on the very precarous ground of strictly regulating what a person can or cannot ingest in his or her own body, and if that isn't big brother, I don't know what is. Future generations may learn to use performance enhancing substances in such an effective and safe  way that everyone ends up using them, and they all scoff at amazement at us for using them so crudely, and dangerously, and with such loud controversy. But we won't be around to see it.