Ryan Braun lied. Ryan Braun is a cheater. And in other news,
the sky is blue.
It is just about as shocking to me that Ryan Braun lied
about being clean as I am that the sun rose in the east this morning. Why
wouldn’t he? There is no downside, no real consequence either way. At the end
of the day, Braun is just the next in a long, seemingly never ending, line of
professional athletes who use, and subsequently lie about using, Performance Enhancing
Drugs (PED’s). Ryan Braun isn’t the problem; he is a product, the result, of
the problem. It is time to address the elephant in the room- the root of the
PED epidemic in Baseball.
Major League Baseball, in particular, has created a culture
that not only fosters, but encourages, the use of PED’s. Yep, I said it. Whether
this culture was created knowingly and purposefully, or whether it is the
byproduct of a campaign to do anything possible to save Baseball from itself after
the ’94 strike, I can’t say and we may never know. It almost doesn’t matter.
What does matter is that this epidemic is a runaway train that lost its brakes
hundreds of miles ago. It has gotten so out of control, and so beyond itself,
that one could fairly easily argue that players in the Major League system, at
any level, are stupid not to juice else risk losing their job to someone who
does, or worse- never get the job in the first place. Think about that, MLB has
created a league in which players are putting themselves at a huge disadvantage
if they DON’T cheat. Bueller?!
The worst part of all of this is that somewhere along the
way, we lost the game. The game as we knew it, America’s pastime, has become
completely unrecognizable and, instead, we’re left with the love child of MLB The
Show and the WWE. For shame. The only way any of this is going to change is if
the consequences of PED use become greater than the contracts, dollars and
infamy the competitive advantage their use affords. Give me a break with the 50
and 100 game suspensions. Why not just give known offenders a tropical vacation
and a welcome back bash upon their return? If you’d have told me in High School
that the consequences for being caught cheating were a 5 day suspension for the
first offense and a 10 day suspension for the second offense, after which I’d
be welcomed back to class with the grade my cheating earned me fully intact,
you’d better believe I’d have been a 4.0 student with a few multiple day
vacations. The only way to clean up the game and to restore it anywhere close
to its glory, is if being caught hits cheaters where it matters- in their
pocket books and in their legacies. Wipe their numbers from the record books and ban
them from the game they claim to love. Aggressive? I’d bet those Major Leaguers
who do play the game cleanly don’t think so.
Baseball, in its purest form, is a wonderful game. A game
that transcends generations, age, and nationality, and if this latest scandal
has taught us anything, it’s that it is time to stop paying lip service to
cleaning up the game, and to actually do it.
C
PS- Aaron Rodgers, if you were going to reprise the role of
Squints Palledorous from the Sandlot, I hope Benny at least hooked you up with
a new pair of PF Flyers.
