Idiots Write About Sports

My wife, whenever faced with a topic of discussion she finds insipid or uninteresting, dismisses any further conversation by singing, to the tune of that French can-can song whose actual name escapes me a the moment, “Don’t care/Don’t care/Don’t care/Don’t care/Don’t care/Don’t Care/Don’t Care.” It’s what makes her the delightful person she is.

Anyhow, I’m having much the same reaction to the congressional hearings on steroids and the horrible impact its held on our youth and their health. The hearings are a farce, the invitation to players to come and “clear your names” is bullshit, and watching this dog-and-pony show will only make me cranky and irritated first thing in the morning. Well… crankier and more irritated, to be accurate.

I flipped on ESPN and there was Buster Olney making his tut-tut “another black eye for baseball” face, and I immediately changed the channel.

Both Will Carroll and David Pinto have stronger stomachs for this nonsense than I do, and both are blogging the hearings live.

I'm surprised, Phil. Those guys were such weasels yesterday, even I was pissed off. I remember when McGuire hit his 70 homers and IBD decided to do a Leaders & Success profile on him. Even at that time, they had to do a little dance around the performance-enhancing drugs issue. I can't remember what you said at the time, but I remember what I was thinking: This is why I prefer to write about the dead. They rarely disappoint you.

"Those guys were such weasels yesterday, even I was pissed off."

I assume by "those guys," Ben, you're referring to Messers. McGwire, Canseco, Sosa, et. al. Perhaps so. But even if the players threw up on their shoes, peppered their testimony with profanity and wrote on the walls in crayon, they couldn't have possibly come off worse than the elected officials running the witch hunt. Grandstanding nincompoops who knew nothing about the issues at hand other than what they read in hysterical news reports and who couldn't be bothered to educate themselves further, they spent the afternoon vowing to get to the bottom of the horrible scourge of steroids that has baseball so tightly in its grip that a whole 12 players out of the 750 or so major leaguers actually tested positive last year. WHAT WILL WE TELL THE CHILDREN?

And now what? From the sound of the hearings, it seems like the congressmen think the federal government should somehow get involved in drug testing (for baseball, mind you, and not football, where players have grown in size in the past decade through hard work and mom's home cooking...). And those were the members of The Party of Small Government. If I were a conservative Republican and people of my ideological bent were advocating that, they'd have to take away my belt and shoelaces.

The entire day has put me in a sour mood, realizing what a gang of dullards we've put in charge of saving social security, securing our borders and protecting us from terrorists. Perhaps I will explore the issue further, once I can convince myself that it's worth living in a world peopled by such nitwits.

That's more like it.

Club Secretary: I say, Lawrence. You are a clown!
T.E. Lawrence: We can't all be lion tamers.

   -- Lawrence of Arabia

Post a comment