Sorry, No Anthony Weiner Jokes Today

Anthony Weiner (D-NY).
Stop snickering.

On June 6, 2011, U.S. Representative Anthony Weiner (D-NY) admitted that the inappropriate photograph sent to a West Coast college student was indeed of his own crotch—which he’d previously denied, sort of—and that he, rather than a hacker, was responsible both for the photograph of his equipment and for sending it along.

Bowling in the Dark hereby declares that we plan to continue to go against the grain of childish media and blogosphere coverage by refusing to make cheap jokes capitalizing on the similarity between the Congressman’s name—Weiner—and the popular slang term for male genitalia.

That term, by the way, is “wiener.”

Wiener wiener wiener.

We refuse to describe Rep. Weiner’s situation as a pickle, or his foolish and self-defeating antics as “pulling a boner.” We will not discuss Weiner’s irritated reaction to the constant media scrutiny as “testy,” or point out or that if he hopes to be re-elected, he’s sure to encounter stiff competition. We resolutely refuse to turn this situation into an opportunity to observe how there’s now even more pork in Washington than before, or suggest that Representative Weiner needs to be more frank with his constituents.

In keeping with this small effort to return the internet to a state of dignity and decorum, we will also refrain from mentioning the following politicians if—or more likely when—they find themselves embroiled in humorous and embarrassing dick-based scandals:

• Andrew Johnson
• Lyndon Johnson
• Richard M. Johnson
• Spiro Agnew¹
• Dick Armey
• Dick Cheney
• Dick Lamm
• Dick Posthumus
• Dick Swett
• Peter Murphy
• John Boehner
• Frank Schmuck
• Ben Bushyhead
• George Bush
• George W. Bush
• Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrick
• John Cox
• Harry Baals

And it should go without saying that we won’t ever stoop so low as to make a cheap joke out of mentioning such non-politicians as Wee Willie Keeler, Bobby Cox, Dick Trickle, Beaver Dick, Jerk Meat, or Dick Hertz from Holden.²

We appreciate your understanding in this matter as we try to return class and good manners to the blogosphere. Our firm stance on wieners may be hard for you to take, but rest assured, putting our foot down on wieners hurts us far more than it hurts you.

NOTES

1. The name “Spiro Agnew” may not be funny in and of itself, but you can rearrange its letters to spell “grow a penis,” and that’s just great. Thanks, Dave Barry.

2. An old roommate from the east coast once told us that he’d looked in a Holden, Massachusetts, phone book and found “Dick Hertz” in there, but we’re inclined to believe now that he was making it up. What kind of person makes things up? People like our old roommate, we guess. His name was Ollie Tabooger.

Fake Pandas for Sale, part 2

The stunning revelation of the existence of the panda cow has excited not only our exclusive cadre of readers but also weird-cow enthusiasts worldwide, but the buzz surrounding this wet-eyed offense against God pales in comparison to the excitement generated by the mere mention of the impossible fever-dream that is the Hello Kitty Cow:

“Who gives a shit if a cow looks like a panda? It's still not cute. . . . I don’t care if a cow has Hello Kitty all over it, it’s still ugly and stupid.”

—Dr. Brainsmart, 1/9/2011

“I believe that a cow bedecked with Hello Kitty might with no exaggeration be termed the greatest gift yet bestowed upon humanity by a just and loving God.”

—Smaktakula, 1/10/2011

At least we thought it was an impossible fever-dream. It’s long been common knowledge that cows, in their futile and increasingly desperate efforts to avoid being turned into meat—yummy, yummy meat—have strained at the boundaries of cuteness ethics for decades, if not centuries.

Nice try, assholes. Just get

in the chute already.

Fortunately for human civilization, their overt attempts have been, for the most part, more pathetic than convincing. Shaggy moptop hair hasn’t been on the cutting edge of cuteness since late-1960s Liverpool; giant eyeballs can be used to crippling effect by puppies and babies, but on a cow they’re just special landing strips for especially huge flies; and their desperate Jenny McCarthy impressions haven’t been appealing since, well, ever, as far as we can tell.

We at Bowling in the Dark, however, have been been made aware that these pathetic, stumbling efforts—which might be somewhat endearing in their clumsiness, if cows didn’t insist on being so damned delicious—are merely a smokescreen, a crafty cover-up of insidious efforts currently underway.

Highly placed BITD operatives in the offices of U.S. Representative Hank Johnson (D-GA), chair of the House Committee on Teddy Bear and Hello Kitty Affairs, recovered the following classified photographs at great personal risk:

These efforts are obviously in the preliminary stages, and a genuinely effective Hello Kitty cow may still be many peaceful years away. Frankly, these cows appear to be just as tasty as several billion of their predecessors, they barely even register as “cute,” and remain as blindingly stupid as a whole sack full of much tinier, equally stupid cows.¹

Also heartening is the fact that the American public, fickle though it may be, will never truly accept the juiced-up, cynically fake Hello Kitty cow the way it embraces the all-natural cuteness of the panda.² These cows have a chance only to be come the Mark McGwire and Barry Bonds of cuteness—all jacked up and perhaps unstoppable, but fakers, disrespected and empty inside. The panda is Babe Ruth—all natural, all real, and 100% American.³ Also super-fat.

The cutest cow on Earth has nothing on you, fatpants.

NOTES

1. Making these cows, if possible, very nearly as stupid as the metaphor we just used to describe them.

2. We cannot, in good conscience, verbally abuse cute animals without at least providing a link to Fuck You, Penguin, the now-defunct but groundbreaking blog whose shtick we’re shamelessly imitating (and not for the first time). If we have seen farther than others, it is because we have stood on the shoulders of Fuck You, Penguin.
3. Here we use a very broad definition of “100% American” that includes things that are actually 100% Chinese.

Price on Freedom of Speech Raised to $500

Countless bumper stickers across the country remind us that “Freedom Isn’t [or occasionally Ain’t] Free,” and 2004’s Team America: World Police took this one step further by calculating the price of freedom to be precisely $1.05. Apparently, though, the good folks in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, have decided to up the ante considerably. On December 21, 2010, bus passenger and recent Milwaukee transplant Terry Duncan found out just how costly his freedoms were after he was fined five hundred dollars by an undercover police officer simply for speaking.¹

A few things worth mentioning here:

• Duncan was not acting in a hostile or abusive manner to the driver or his fellow passengers.
• Duncan was not threatening the president (or past presidents), which as we all know is a federal offense, even if the president in question, past or present, kinda sucks. Which he quite possibly does. Warren G. Harding, I’m looking at you.
• Duncan was not shouting “fire” in a crowded theater, which is considered a no-no if the theater is not, in fact, on fire.

What Terry Duncan did on that bus, simply put, was use naughty words. He wasn’t swearing at anybody, but rather was merely “engaged in a conversation when he let the expletives slip.” He said both “fuck” and “shit”² conversationally—perhaps as little as once each³—and received not only a ticket but also a healthy ration of smirking disdain from fellow passengers who, as accomplished legal scholars, are well aware that their Constitutionally-protected right to not be offended trumps others’ rights to free speech.⁴

We here at Bowling in the Dark tend to swear fairly often, but despite our personal flaws, we aren’t big fans of vulgarity. We’re saddened when we hear it from the mouths of children (except when it’s funny), and believe that excessive use of profanity is embarrassing and usually a sign of a limited vocabulary. But the unpleasant nature of naughty language doesn’t give us the right to control anybody’s language but our own.

An official statement from the Milwaukee County sherriff’s department addressing the matter claims that “people should be able to ride the bus without feeling intimidated by someone’s language or behavior.” Bus passengers interviewed after the incident tended to agree:

“You can’t swear. A lot of people don't like all the ‘f’ words and ‘s’ words around their kids, and there’s a lot of elderly people on the bus, and you have to respect your elders so, that’s what he gets.”—bus passenger Ebony Jett⁶

“I think he should have got [the ticket]. Kids be on the bus, families be on the bus. Nobody wants to hear that kind of language.”—bus passenger Jean Jones

“People should not get on the bus having to hear disruptive conversations. You can get a fine for that. It’s the law. You can’t do that.”—bus passenger Tiffany Coo

In the interest of giving equal time to opinions actually worth having, though, let’s hear from somebody who actually fought for others’ liberties instead of trying to whittle away the ones he didn’t like:

“If the freedom of speech is taken away then dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep to the slaughter.”—George Washington

We admit that General Washington didn’t specifically say “and that includes naughty words, too,” so it could be argued—albeit very stupidly—that he may actually have approved of stomping on certain folks’ rights when he didn’t like what he was hearing, despite having clearly stated the opposite. Fortunately, other smart folks have chimed in on the subject over the last 2,300 years:

“Free speech is the whole thing, the whole ball game. Free speech is life itself.”—author Salman Rushdie 
  <blockquote><a href="http://www.quotecosmos.com/quotes/15909/view">Free speech is the whole thing, the whole ball game. Free speech is life itself..</a></blockquote><br> <a href="http://www.quotecosmos.com/authors/6322/Salman_Rushdie">Rushdie, Salman</a><br> Quote from <a href="http://quotecosmos.com">Quote Cosmos</a>
“The basis of a democratic state is liberty.”—Aristotle, 384 BC-322 BC

“The First Amendment is often inconvenient. But that is besides the point. Inconvenience does not absolve the government of its obligation to tolerate speech.”—U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Anthony Kennedy

Salman Rushdie, as you should well know, has more experience than most anybody at being persecuted simply for expressing himself; Aristotle, while perhaps better known for having married Jackie Kennedy, also dabbled in education, science, government, philosophy, politics, and ethics,⁷ and is known for knowing a thing or two; and it could be argued that a U.S. Supreme Court Justice with more than three decades of judicial experience has a better sense of what’s appropriate, legally and Constitutionally speaking, than the Milwaukee County Sherriff’s Department or a bunch of schmucks on a bus.

But ignore all their qualifications if you like, and instead just boil down the comments from each group to their basics, and decide which attitude sums up what this country and its citizens’ attitudes on free expression should be. In fact, skip that first part; we’ve boiled it down for you:

1. “You must be allowed to say what you want, even if I don’t like it.”
2. “You can’t say what you want because I don’t like it.”

Or, to illustrate it a touch more crudely,

Figure 1.1: the two ends of the spectrum of opinions on freedom of speech. 

Pick a side. 

(Hint: the guy on the left is very unlikely to advocate killing the douchebag on the right.)

NOTES

1. We use the word speaking here for convenience; it’s a handy way to represent the much more cumbersome phrase exercising one’s once-Constitutionally-protected right to free speech.

2. If you’re offended that we typed out the words “fuck” and “shit” instead of a more family-friendly “f___” or Beetle Bailey-style “@$#!” . . . well, frankly, it’s a little surprising that you allow yourself to have unmonitored access to the internet, but nevertheless we sincerely apologize for having troubled you with language that, admittedly, can occasionally or even often be inappropriate or offensive. You’d be well within your rights to ask us to tone it down, and it’s quite possible that we’d oblige—we may be jerks, but we don’t like looking like jerks. On the other hand, if you think you have or deserve the right to prevent us from using this kind of language, you can go fuck yourself.

3. Duncan said he used “two words,” which could mean that he swore only twice or that he swore multiple times, but used only those two particular words—the articles we’ve found haven’t been particularly clear on this point.

4. Here we’re trying to use irony,⁵ but it’s a slippery concept that we can usually recognize but can’t really define and rarely use properly. If we haven’t pulled it off correctly, and you’re not sure what we’re getting at, contact us privately and we’ll send you a copy of our extensive notes.

5. Some might say that we’re not being ironic, we’re just being pricks. That’s probably fair.

6. We here at Bowling in the Dark have no way of knowing whether this person’s name really is “Ebony Jett,” but we promise you that we weren’t the ones who made it up.

7. No real footnote here, we’re just a bit giddy to see the words politics and ethics in the same sentence. It’s like spotting a unicorn.

A Much Better Declaration of Principles

It has been discreetly brought to our attention that some of the content in our most recent post, “A Declaration of Principles,” may bear a passing and wholly accidental resemblance to a vaguely similar declaration from an obscure, poorly-publicized pre–World War II film.

Bowling in the Dark’s Department of Integrity, Fact-Checking, and Cover-ups would like to assure our readers that any resemblance between the lines from this movie—which, incidentally, was too lame to even be filmed in color—and the declaration we earlier claimed as our own is pure coincidence, utterly inadvertent, and almost certainly somebody else’s fault. We’re pretty sure we can pin it all on the current or former American president—each of them, of course, worse than Hitler—provided either we or our readers have had enough to drink.

We would also like to point out that borrowing other people’s work to make ourselves look smarter, clever, or more relevant—while frowned upon in some circles, particularly snooty academics and navel-gazers who value hilariously outdated notions like “truth” and “honesty”—is well within the bounds of our established principles.

Nevertheless, to minimize the odds of our being investigated by a feeble and toothless panel of Boulderite academics or, worse yet, of being pursued to the ends of the Earth by Orson Welles’s vengeful zombie, we have assembled a fresh set of principles, which follow below. For your reading pleasure we have arranged them in order from the most modest, personal, and humble to the most pompous, self-aggrandizing, and possibly delusional, with some smatterings of snottiness scattered throughout:

I.To make ourselves (and, if possible, our readers) laugh, when we’re trying to be funny.


II.To occasionally provoke a thought or two, and possibly even generate some lively discussion, when we’re not trying to be funny.


III.To never be—whether we have two readers or two hundred (or, more likely, eight)—a waste of our readers’ time.¹


IV.To write about whatever we darn well please, even if that means 152 consecutive columns on, for example, salary cap issues in major league baseball or mockery of folks who think the Apocalypse is right around the corner.


V.To eventually, somehow, introduce ourselves to readers who aren’t family members or close personal friends.


VI.To listen respectfully to, thoughtfully address, and then promptly disregard any and all criticism, no matter how legitimate, insightful, or beneficial.


VII.To turn Bowling in the Dark into an obscenely lucrative media empire so that we, Squid Bandit and Some Guy, can achieve our simple, humble childhood dreams of racing across the United States in solid gold Ferraris to see our faces added to Mount Rushmore.


VIII.To ruin Citizen Kane for everybody who reads this by explaining “Rosebud,” the movie’s central mystery, to our readers.²

SQUID BANDIT and SOME GUY
THE PUBLISHERS
Bowling in the Dark

NOTES
1. It’s hard for us to believe that any free internet content truly can be a waste of time, but it’s impossible to deny that it can be found if you know where to look.
2. “Rosebud” is the last word that Charles Foster Kane (played by Orson Welles) whispers on his deathbed. Nobody has ever found out what it means, which is why Citizen Kane is universally regarded as a shitty movie.

The "What If?" Monster

Let's play a game - everyone's favorite game of "What If??". You may want to call it "Hindsight is 20/20" or "shoulda, woulda coulda" or one of any number of other similar names. The dreaded hypothetical. Here goes.

What if there was a young man (let's not get into whether women should play in a men's league) who wanted to play professional baseball. This hypothetical young man is 19 years old these days. He's fast and has good athletic skill and has been playing baseball most of his life. He's very strong, so he can hit the ball a country mile. And he can throw from right field like there's a cannon out there. He strikes out a lot though, so scouts for major league teams have concluded that he likely won't do much in the majors. After much review of his mechanics and studying film and whatnot, this player and his coaches determine that he can't see the ball very well. He can see just fine to drive a car, but needs glasses to read a book.

So the kid needs glasses to play. Except glasses are too dangerous to wear on the field, so he gets these tiny lenses to place on his eye to improve his vision. Contact lenses make his vision pretty close to 20/20. Ballplayers a couple generations ago couldn't dream of that advancement, but now it's pretty standard. He starts striking out less, which is good!

His fledgling career is going aces until he slides awkwardly into third base legging out a triple and tears his ACL. Bummer. He has it surgically repaired and is as good as new in about a year. Players a generation ago would have had a new career selling cars, but modern medicine allows for his baseball career to continue, this just being a speed bump on his way to stardom. He's 20 years old now, almost 21, and still considered a future All-Star!

That is, until he crashes into a wall making a spectacular catch in right field. His knee again, this time the cartilage. Good news for him - there is a new procedure called micro-fracture surgery, and he can keep playing! Players just five years ago or so with this injury would have been done, but this is now a lifeline for his baseball career. Twelve short months later, he's playing again!

Our baseball man is now 25 years old and fresh off his first All-Star season. His vision starts bothering him again in Spring Training, and he's not hitting very well. It gets worse, and he drops in the batting order. He sees a specialist, who recommends laser eye surgery. Zap - one week later his vision is now better than ever, being a tested 20/15! Amazing - he starts tearing the cover off the ball again.

Fast forward four or five years. Our boy is pushing for that big free agent contract a year from now. One game he uncorks a throw from right that nails the runner at the plate, and he feels a pop in his arm. It's his elbow, and he needs surgery. This one has become fairly routine, the procedure commonly known as Tommy John surgery. Twelve months later, still with time left to push for that contract, he's back on the field and can seemingly throw even harder. Players 40 years ago may have had to quit, or at least switch to first base maybe, but not out modern player!

Move forward another five years. After corrective lenses, two surgeries on his legs, vision enhancing surgery on his eyes and a procedure on his arm, our guy is still playing at a fairly high level, but wants one last big contract. At this point in time, medicine has developed a pill that can reverse, or at least forestall, the effects of aging at the cellular level. It's not approved by the FDA yet, but Canada has it readily available. Upon taking this pill for a while our 36-37 year old feels ten years younger, can run as fast as he did when he was 25, can see better and does not get tired anymore. He continues putting up good numbers as an outfielder.

Ten years later our guy retires from professional baseball, having made over $300 million in his career and putting up numbers that will make him a sure-fire first ballot Hall of Famer, including a 75-homer season when the League expanded to 34 teams (more bad pitchers in the L).

Is it just me or is the line between ALL OF THIS and steroids and greenies really, really, fuzzy? Is it simply the illegality of the particular enhancement that bothers people? If so, that I can get on board with. But much more often than not I see the moral argument being made, that the steroid user "cheated the game" (as entirely distinct from "broke the law") and had an unfair advantage. And THAT'S that reason Bonds doesn't really compare to Ruth. Help me find the line, people!

Mark McGwire: Counterpoint

It may be a bad idea to post my thoughts on Mark McGwire’s steroid use immediately after the Squid Bandit has done the same thing—it runs the risk of boring those readers who suffer from underdeveloped attention spans or (as a less insulting option) don’t like baseball—but my hope is that going head-to-head with our opinions might generate some good discussion on the topic, even if it’s just between the two of us.¹ And I’m also going to use a fun picture. Who doesn’t like pictures?

I can’t say that I was particularly surprised when I heard that McGwire had admitted to using steroids² off and on for the bulk of his sixteen-year career. His size, his incredible power at an age when most power hitters’ strength and batspeed have begun their clear decline, his evasive testimony before Congress, the accusations made by both Jose Canseco and McGwire’s younger brother (a bodybuilder and admitted steroid user), and the twelve to fifteen baseballs he hit into geostationary orbit all made the notion of Mac-the-steroid-user seem not just believable but even obvious to most folks with more than a passing interest in the game.

I have mixed feelings about his confession. I admire him for his willingness to face the nation—or, if not the entire nation, at least his competitors; his past, current, and future employers; and the fans whose support allowed him to make a living—and admit that he’d failed, that he did cheat not only the game of baseball but also its fans, whether they cheered for him or his opponents. Even if he was merely confirming what so many of us suspected (and thus not doing as significant damage to his reputation), it takes a big man to admit that.³ While I don’t know McGwire at all and certainly can’t tell what’s going on in his head, I’m inclined to believe that his shame and his relief at the truth coming out are genuine.

At the same time, though, his mea sorta culpa is still self-serving, coming as it does several years after the statute of limitations for prosecution had expired, and mere weeks before he’s scheduled to start work as the St. Louis Cardinals’ hitting coach. In short, Mark McGwire ducked the question when there was something to lose, kept quiet when there was nothing on the line, and piped up only when there was clearly much to gain.

What bothers me more than that, though, comes not from McGwire but from media sources—like Rob Neyer, in the article to which Squid Bandit referred—implying or outright stating that to criticize a cheater for cheating is somehow sanctimonious or hypocritical:

You may, if you like, continue to summon from your wellspring of self-righteousness the energy to condemn McGwire for doing what so many of his peers were doing, all in the interest of earning a good living and fulfilling his widely considered destiny.

If Neyer sees it as self-righteous to disapprove of one cheater's cheating, he can take solace in the fact that I'll disapprove of the rest of them when I find out who they are. And I’m sorry, but “all the cool kids were doing it” has not, as far as I can tell, ever been an effective argument. Neither is Neyer’s admission that he’d be tempted to cheat to make himself a better writer (I think the next step up from sportswriting is want ads, right?), or the argument (not put forth by Neyer or Squid Bandit, but one that you can’t help but read if you tune into the discussion) that “you’d do it to if you had a chance.” And I disagree with the notion that “if you [aren’t] cheatin[g], you [aren’t] tryin[g].”⁴ The opposite seems more obviously true: if you’re cheating, it’s because you’re less willing to try; you're looking not for the way to do things right, but the way to do things quick and (relatively) easily.

McGwire wishes he “had never played during the steroid era.” I take this at face value, and I accept what I feel is the genuine emotion behind it, but I believe it’s also a cop-out. A lot of folks looked at Mark McGwire as a bit of a hero—at least in that very limited, silly way in which athletes can be heroes—when he hit his boatload of home runs in 1998. He’d have been much more genuine a hero, though, if he’d had the backbone to stay clean in his era, the heart to do what was right when it really would have mattered, instead of when it’d do little more than clear his conscience and help him get back to a steady paycheck in the game he did his own small part to corrupt.

NOTES
1. The other risk worth considering, of course, is that by disagreeing with Squid Bandit on this issue, we risk creating an un-healable schism between readers torn by our compelling points of view and our irresistible personal charisma. It’s possible that in a thousand years, conflicts between the Someguyists and the Squidinistas (or possibly the Squindus, or the Squislims) will tear our society apart, all because of the tensions created right here at this very moment.
2. I use the word “steroids” throughout as an umbrella term to describe any performance-enhancing drug, including androstenedione, which was legal when McGwire used it in 1998; while there are plenty of differences between the varying types of PEDs, I don’t really know or understand them, and for my purposes they’re not particularly relevant.
3. But not an unnaturally big man, of course, as that’s what got him into all this trouble in the first place.
4. Grammar and spelling have been corrected to show, yet again, that I’m an anal-retentive butthole.

End of the Inning

Good Morning Vietnam is a terrific movie and the source of numerous quotes any fan can recall at an instant. One of my favorite lines, the biggest gem in the mine, is the following. Adrian Cronauer, when asked by his superior officer what was the significance of “three up and three down” on his uniform, responded:

“End of an inning?”

That’s sort of how I feel about steroids. In a slow time for baseball (no, the possible destinations of Johnny Damon does not count as news), there came the shocking (shocking I tell you!!) admission from Mark McGwire that yes, he did in fact use steroids. Did you jump up and down in anger? Scream “I told you so!” to the TV? Did you, Cardinals fans, quietly mumble “I want my summer of ’98 back…”? Or was your response somewhat similar to my own:

Yawn.

Perusing the internet for a while on the subject leads to one of two kinds of articles, mostly. Sure there is the occasional rant about how McGwire “cheated the game” or some such nonsense. But for the most part people were either saying “Duh – of course he did” or “Why is he admitting this now?”

It’s that second question that intrigues me. Yeah, I get it. Steroids are bad. They mess up your body, causing everything from shrinking testicles and baldness to high blood pressure and liver tumors. In children steroids can stunt muscular and skeletal growth. Yep, they’re bad. But doesn’t it seem odd that McGwire would lie to Congress about using steroids, but tell the truth just as he is about to get another job in baseball (as the Cardinals’ hitting coach)?

Why do we care so much about baseball players taking them? What about football players? Shawn Merriman got a four game suspension for testing positive – he’s an all-star caliber player, and not many people even remember that he tested positive. Barry Bonds, Rafael Palmiero and Mark McGwire, on the other hand, are seen as sports demons, the personification of evil in athletics. I believe that part of this outrage is the hallowed baseball statistics – no one gives a crap about Guillermo Mota testing positive, because no one has any idea who he is. But McGwire? Saved baseball after labor strife and broke the single-season home run record, a record that has been romanticized in sports as perhaps the greatest record in athletics (a status once reserved for the heavyweight champion of the world in boxing, but I digress). So that romance is shattered, stolen by a cheating liar. Maybe the other part is that baseball players have not expressed extreme remorse over their actions. No hypocrisy there at all – as Rob Neyer so eloquently points out.

I suppose I simply am a terrible person for lacking the proper moral outrage for McGwire’s actions. I just can’t. There’s an old baseball adage goes something like “If you ain’t cheatin’ then you ain’t tryin’”. Despite the fact that apparently they did not know how to speak the King’s English when this adage was first spoken, which is sure to spark Some Guy’s ire, it has endured. Why now is the ubiquitous cheating an intolerable stain in baseball? Like Neyer says, pretty much all of us would have done the same thing. In my view, it’s like being morally outraged by the thief who steals bread for his starving family, among an entire cadre of theives.

When it was first revealed that steroids were a prevalent part of baseball some said the game as we knew it was at an end. That was nonsense. The history of the game of baseball is like a game itself, and the steroid era was a bad inning. But it wasn’t the LAST inning. Hopefully as more information is made public about steroid use we will see an end of the fear-mongering and moral outrage spewed by media types. Hopefully, eventually, we will see the steroid inning in our pasttime's legacy come to a close, as if a Mariano Rivera cutter caught the inside corner for strike three.