Seven Hundred and Fifty Eh and Worse, Batboy’s home is gone.
Well Barry Bonds is now holds the record for the most home runs in a career. And while I’m not fond of Bonds, I have to say when ever I find myself and the New York Post on the same side, it’s a mark that I should re-examine my position. Their headline was just mean and childish but that’s you expect of the Post.
That said, I still think the only real long term effect of Barry’s quest has been to remind baseball fans of what a good player Aaron was.
The whole steroid era has and will have long term bad effects on the game as time goes on – the era by the by, was the result of Baseball’s wounded position after Bud Selig first damaged baseball by canceling the world series in an effort to cripple the baseball players union. One of the stupider decisions of what has been a pretty constant stream of stupid decisions. It didn’t break the Union (and god in heaven what is with the need to break unions- you can really screw workers a lot easier by making deals with union leaders but no, the desire to be absolute rules runs strong in the boardrooms, never mind that none of them can hit a curveball) and it left baseball in a bad state, so bad that when McGuire and Sosa and well everybody else started juicing Bud decided (bad decision number two) not to do anything about it. (also he would have needed the cooperation of the baseball players union and after his attempts to destroy it, they really weren’t about to cooperate with Selig on anything) so he hawked the new playoff system and Inter-league play (I don’t like either idea and I still don’t but I’m not going to say that’s really a bad decision on his part cause that is just my own subjective opinion) and celebrate McGuire’s 70 home runs. Like it was kind of his idea. Selig is good at that kind of thing; he was a used car sales man back in the day.
There were a lot of stories about how baseball is back and all that and after the disastrous strike year the last thing anybody wanted to do was rock the boat about ‘roids.
So it became let’s pretend that somehow these guys are stronger because of more exercise or some thing. Bonds of course was one of these players. There is an odd subset of folks who continue to use the word ‘alleged’ about Bond’s steroid use – which does leave them the having to explain how a man at 35 (or thereabouts I’m too lazy to look up the actual date) suddenly gains 20-30 pounds of muscle, grows a bigger head, has his hair fall out, gets bad skin, if anything gets a worse personality, and becomes a home run hitting machine when before that was hitting at most 40 a year – with out resort to magic spells from a witch.
We know, to quote Jay Gould the evolutionary biologist who wrote books like ‘the mismeasure of man’ more about baseball than we know about any other human activity – and in the history of the game nobody has ever done what Bonds did – vastly improve his offensive stats across the board as he got older (i.e. in his 30’s). That being the case, the reasonable explanation is that he was juicing –it’s that or he’s a mutant or magic spells were involved. And as much as folks love Harry Potter magic doesn’t work. (If it did there would be cabinet position ‘Chief Wizard’ or some such. That god there isn’t – can you imagine what kind of horrible choice W would make filling that position? The mind reels. ‘I’d like ya to all meet mah new Chief Wizard – Sauron the Great. Questions?”).
Working out alone doesn’t cut it – both Carlton Fisk and Carl Yazstremski maintained ferocious workout schedules in their later years that allowed them to play baseball well into the their 40’s but their offensive statistics showed decline as time when on without any sudden rise. The same as Steve Carlton and even Nolan Ryan who when he was older, a coach said “Well he’ll never throw it over 100 again’ (given that Nolan’s best years were before we had decent radar guns lord knows just how fast he was tossing the ball, best guesses back then were 105-106 – one of the reasons I’d rather watch than play- ouch.)
And an effect of ‘roids is that you heal quicker so that the wear and tear of the long baseball season doesn’t effect you. Until recently, when Bonds started to get the kind of weird ailments you typically get from steroid abuse (a healthy 40 year old man does not get the kind of persistent infection he was dealing with a couple years ago unless well, you know the drill by now.) the man was a horse.
So Bonds became this mutant roid freak and the press and baseball put their fingers in their ears and went “La La La We can’t hear you’ until, well Bonds was knocking on the door of the home run record and 50 homer years were common and …
Well then they had hearings – there is now a steroid test policy (but not for human growth hormone yet) but as The Tour De France can tell you once the juicing starts it’s hard to get it to stop and you are in for embarrassing moments - I lost count of just how many tour riders got kicked out for testing positive this year – and it’s going to hurt.
If baseball is serious about this they would do well to study what FIFA does – they have their own damn lab in Switzerland dedicated to making their tests better and keeping up with the juicers advances in technology.
But getting back to Barry, oh let’s not cause he’s such a jerk it gives me a headache dealing with him. Anyway I’m more than willing to lay him like the unlovely mutant baby he is at the feet of MLB, the players, TV and the Press who all for reasons they thought were good at the time didn’t do the job. He’s your child, enjoy.
But enough of that – the sad news comes that the Weekly World News will stop publication with the August 27th issue. The News had been going downhill since the folks who gave us such headlines as “Statue of Elvis Found on Mars” and Batboy had sold it and the National Inquirer and such like to new owners who didn’t under stand the weird report made up shit as straight as you could without camping it up style of the News. Still I own a copy of “Saddam;s Submarines in Lake Michigan” which I will show my nieces and nephew’s children so they will understand just how fucked up we were in 2003.
I am trapped in Queens today by the early morning rains in New York that had a tornado watch issued for the area near Kennedy airport.
One of the side effects of global warming that I remember mentioned was that storms were likely to get more intense – not just hurricanes but such things as thunderstorms as well.
In other words – get used to this.
Peace, Love, Statue of Elvis found on Mars.
Blogger hates pics for the moment.
That said, I still think the only real long term effect of Barry’s quest has been to remind baseball fans of what a good player Aaron was.
The whole steroid era has and will have long term bad effects on the game as time goes on – the era by the by, was the result of Baseball’s wounded position after Bud Selig first damaged baseball by canceling the world series in an effort to cripple the baseball players union. One of the stupider decisions of what has been a pretty constant stream of stupid decisions. It didn’t break the Union (and god in heaven what is with the need to break unions- you can really screw workers a lot easier by making deals with union leaders but no, the desire to be absolute rules runs strong in the boardrooms, never mind that none of them can hit a curveball) and it left baseball in a bad state, so bad that when McGuire and Sosa and well everybody else started juicing Bud decided (bad decision number two) not to do anything about it. (also he would have needed the cooperation of the baseball players union and after his attempts to destroy it, they really weren’t about to cooperate with Selig on anything) so he hawked the new playoff system and Inter-league play (I don’t like either idea and I still don’t but I’m not going to say that’s really a bad decision on his part cause that is just my own subjective opinion) and celebrate McGuire’s 70 home runs. Like it was kind of his idea. Selig is good at that kind of thing; he was a used car sales man back in the day.
There were a lot of stories about how baseball is back and all that and after the disastrous strike year the last thing anybody wanted to do was rock the boat about ‘roids.
So it became let’s pretend that somehow these guys are stronger because of more exercise or some thing. Bonds of course was one of these players. There is an odd subset of folks who continue to use the word ‘alleged’ about Bond’s steroid use – which does leave them the having to explain how a man at 35 (or thereabouts I’m too lazy to look up the actual date) suddenly gains 20-30 pounds of muscle, grows a bigger head, has his hair fall out, gets bad skin, if anything gets a worse personality, and becomes a home run hitting machine when before that was hitting at most 40 a year – with out resort to magic spells from a witch.
We know, to quote Jay Gould the evolutionary biologist who wrote books like ‘the mismeasure of man’ more about baseball than we know about any other human activity – and in the history of the game nobody has ever done what Bonds did – vastly improve his offensive stats across the board as he got older (i.e. in his 30’s). That being the case, the reasonable explanation is that he was juicing –it’s that or he’s a mutant or magic spells were involved. And as much as folks love Harry Potter magic doesn’t work. (If it did there would be cabinet position ‘Chief Wizard’ or some such. That god there isn’t – can you imagine what kind of horrible choice W would make filling that position? The mind reels. ‘I’d like ya to all meet mah new Chief Wizard – Sauron the Great. Questions?”).
Working out alone doesn’t cut it – both Carlton Fisk and Carl Yazstremski maintained ferocious workout schedules in their later years that allowed them to play baseball well into the their 40’s but their offensive statistics showed decline as time when on without any sudden rise. The same as Steve Carlton and even Nolan Ryan who when he was older, a coach said “Well he’ll never throw it over 100 again’ (given that Nolan’s best years were before we had decent radar guns lord knows just how fast he was tossing the ball, best guesses back then were 105-106 – one of the reasons I’d rather watch than play- ouch.)
And an effect of ‘roids is that you heal quicker so that the wear and tear of the long baseball season doesn’t effect you. Until recently, when Bonds started to get the kind of weird ailments you typically get from steroid abuse (a healthy 40 year old man does not get the kind of persistent infection he was dealing with a couple years ago unless well, you know the drill by now.) the man was a horse.
So Bonds became this mutant roid freak and the press and baseball put their fingers in their ears and went “La La La We can’t hear you’ until, well Bonds was knocking on the door of the home run record and 50 homer years were common and …
Well then they had hearings – there is now a steroid test policy (but not for human growth hormone yet) but as The Tour De France can tell you once the juicing starts it’s hard to get it to stop and you are in for embarrassing moments - I lost count of just how many tour riders got kicked out for testing positive this year – and it’s going to hurt.
If baseball is serious about this they would do well to study what FIFA does – they have their own damn lab in Switzerland dedicated to making their tests better and keeping up with the juicers advances in technology.
But getting back to Barry, oh let’s not cause he’s such a jerk it gives me a headache dealing with him. Anyway I’m more than willing to lay him like the unlovely mutant baby he is at the feet of MLB, the players, TV and the Press who all for reasons they thought were good at the time didn’t do the job. He’s your child, enjoy.
But enough of that – the sad news comes that the Weekly World News will stop publication with the August 27th issue. The News had been going downhill since the folks who gave us such headlines as “Statue of Elvis Found on Mars” and Batboy had sold it and the National Inquirer and such like to new owners who didn’t under stand the weird report made up shit as straight as you could without camping it up style of the News. Still I own a copy of “Saddam;s Submarines in Lake Michigan” which I will show my nieces and nephew’s children so they will understand just how fucked up we were in 2003.
I am trapped in Queens today by the early morning rains in New York that had a tornado watch issued for the area near Kennedy airport.
One of the side effects of global warming that I remember mentioned was that storms were likely to get more intense – not just hurricanes but such things as thunderstorms as well.
In other words – get used to this.
Peace, Love, Statue of Elvis found on Mars.
Blogger hates pics for the moment.
posted by Unknown at 1:35 PM
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