trinityvixen | Let's try this again, shall we?

Let's try this again, shall we?

Professional sports players use performance enhancers. They do. They use them--as many and as often as they think they can get away with. And it's time we either accept that or devote far too much of our science research budget towards ferreting out cheaters with new detection methods. Except if we do the latter, all that will happen is that new drugs will come along and start the whole cycle over again.

Know what won't help? Public shaming. Dragging ball players before Congress. Moralizing. Not even penalizing--because most of the players will get paid whether or not they play. (Perhaps not as well, but almost certainly they will get paid.)

What would help is to get the fuck over it. Let them use steroids. Let them all use it because some are always going to do it. Let's have the all-doped baseball league. Let them discover how fucked up all those hormones and drugs make them. Hell, let's experiment on them and let them grow horns and shit. We can discover newer, better performance enhancers faster than we would with the secret way of doing it, plus we might discover superpowers! You don't know! It could happen! And let's fine the ever-living-shit out of these assholes if they act out of line on the drugs the way we do with booze--they can obviously afford it. Let it all go crazy and fall apart.

Please bear in mind if you object to this strategy, I have a vested interest in taking major sports organizations down because I think they are bloated wastes of our ever-diminishing dollars and are as bad an investment as Lehman Brothers these days. I don't want them to get better; I want them to collapse under the weight of their own grossly over-funded (especially on taxpayer dimes) stadiums and inflated egos. When I say it would "help," I mean it would help me and the economy. Fans of baseball could take over those remade stadiums and actually play some goddamned ball. The people constantly being evicted and foreclosed upon could live in the box seating.

This has been my trip through anti-sports fantasy for today.

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Hell, let's experiment on them and let them grow horns and shit.

LOL. This is why you are awesome.

I'm fucking sick of this shit, you know? Like it's a big secret that people are going to ingest whatever root or poison you give them if they think it will give them a bigger metaphorical COCK? Bitch, please. If it meant the difference between getting paid my salary and 1000x that for half the work, I'd shoot heroin into my eyeballs.

Hell, there are people who'd shoot heroin into their eyeballs and pay for the privilege!!! STOP PRETENDING WE DON'T LOVE DRUGS AND THAT WE DON'T CHEAT!! WE TOTALLY FUCKING CHEAT, NOW LET ME HAVE FUN TURNING ALEX RODRIGUEZ INTO MUTANT X ALREADY!!!

Bravo! I fully support your efforts to turn major league sports players into lab rats.

I look at this from a scientific point of view: we need to do embarrassing, evil clinical trials some times, and here is a group of assholes ready to crush and snort the powderized tablets put in front of them given half a nostril and some time. I say, let 'em. I say put an array of needles with different color solutions in front of them and label only the side-effects and see how many they jam in their veins on the mere promise (as opposed to proof) of performance enhancement. I guaran-fucking-tee you'll have yourself a bunch of syringe porcupines before you can even start your stopwatch.

We've proven how strong their willpower is to resist a) cheating and b) drugs that make them huge, man. If they're that weak-willed, they can't possibly cobble together lawyers in time to sue us before the scales grow over their brain.

If they're that weak-willed, they can't possibly cobble together lawyers in time to sue us before the scales grow over their brain.

You underestimate the power of trial lawyers to sniff out payola. You can find lawyers willing to sue on behalf of disabled dogs; drug-addled sports players are practically a sure thing.

Obviously, the solution is to legalize heroin at the same time, so all the lawyers are distracted by being either high as kites or depressed and impotent.

Lawyers should also be preeeeetty careful about tangling with me once I set up my clinical trials. After professional sports players, the next most useless, overpaid category of human being would be Congress, which is lousy with lawyers. They would do well to ignore fliers sent to them promising "Free Gift Day!" at the local sports stadium...

No, no, not nefarious enough. Hire lobbyists. Pay them in drugs. Give them extra drugs to bring to Congress. Congressmen will take anything a lobbyist gives them and then beg for more.

I like the way you think, sir.

Fully agreed. I also favor torture for the idiot reporter who wasted time last night asking Obama about A-Rod's steroid use. Preferably applied by his employer. At least they didn't cut far enough into "24" that it screwed up my TiVo recording...

That reporter is just mad that he missed photographing Michael Phelps getting a snootful of Mary Jane. Making the President take time off from telling people "DON'T PANIC" is the best he could do.

I also really raise my eyebrow at Obama for dumping all over A-Rod on this score. A-Rod was dishonest and he's a cheater, but his drugs were legal. If you want to get into that hot water, Mr. Ex-Pot Smoker President, you're gonna get burned, too.

Besides which? Anyone who seriously looks up to athletes only so long as they never have any fun can go straight to Hell. Like, they do nothing but train so that you can sit on your fat ass and scream about how they're shitbirds when they don't make the play that you could have made in your sleep. (i.e. in your dreams)

You rock. You absolutely rock. This post has made my day. I am all for putting those exorbitant salaries back into the community! Woo-hoo!! :)

Oh dear Christ, the millions we could have put into, say, keeping our teachers?

Hell, we could start a fund-raiser: pay $5, get to stick A-Rod with some human growth hormone. If he turns into a mutant, we'll both have learned something and blown off steam. We'd be swamped with people coming in from out of town to do it, too, so bonus! Tourist dollars!

The people constantly being evicted and foreclosed upon could live in the box seating.

I dunno, last time we used a stadium for a housing shelter it didn't work so good.

Good point. However, I'm sure that we could kick the assholes in the $1+ million penthouses in the city who are crying about how they don't have billions any more into the stadiums and take over their apartments.

Hell yes! It's the same with AFL here. Players are treated like gods so believe they can do no wrong, and become basically over spoiled bratty little boys. They need to grow the fuck up and realize they can't just take what they want (including women, seriously the rape and innaprpriate conduct charges that come up) and know that the whole world is not just cheering them on, and that their so called "skills" are essentially kicking a pigskin around. Big woop. Pretty fucking pathetic.

Frankly, if steroid use were out in the open, we could do some real goddamned studies about how they affect your emotional state. "'Roid rage" is a trumped up paranoia. (Why blame drugs when plenty of people have problems controlling their tempers or delaying their gratification desires as is?) We need to do research and figure out just how bad this shit is for you.

It would have the bonus effect of making sure steroid users were in the spotlight, so they'd perhaps be forced to behave by virtue of being under closer inspection. We could justifiably ramp up punishments for steroid users who abuse--for instance, it would be perfectly fair to cut off the balls of the overly testosterone-laden lugheads, now wouldn't it? We could then implant those testicles in other players and see if that didn't also work as a "performance enhancer"! EVERYBODY WINS!

The sports business is part of the economy. Your argument is like the Republican case that requiring cleaner factories is a financial sinkhole - it's not, because that money goes to other businesses, which create jobs, etc, etc. Money people spend on tickets and overpriced beer goes back into the economy.
Whether it's a waste of taxpayer money is less clear; I really don't know over what term municipalities recoup their investments on stadiums via increased tax revenue, and I'm not real sure on how accurately anyone can calculate such a thing. Personally I suspect you're correct on that count.

However, I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with professional sports. I'm not a fan, but I know enough intelligent people who are fans not to be willing to label it as such. (Hell, I watch fictional sports once a week! And they have the same problems with steroids that real pro sports does.)

The problem with steroids, as you note, is not that they provide an unfair advantage - it'd be fair if everyone used them - but that they're dangerous, both to the user and to the people around them. And holding people accountable for the stupid things they do while under the influence of drugs only goes so far when the things they do are stupid enough. Aside from the fact that these people - like most celebrities - remain role models to kids, whether we (or they) want them to be or not. So long as we have a culture that worships celebrity, it behooves us to treat celebrities the same as anyone else (which includes filing criminal charges if they break the law, but excludes parading them in front of Congress and generally making a spectacle of the whole thing).

What I think would be far more interesting would be to see what these leagues ~~would do if~~ will do when safe performance-enhancing drugs hit the market. I'm sure they'd initially resist, but once you lab guys do cook up drugs (or nanobots or whatever) to increase strength, endurance, reaction time, etc, without adverse side effects, won't the majority of people start using them? Who would watch baseball knowing that they themselves could play better than the guys on TV? Develop those performance-enhancers and we won't have to worry about ridiculous hearings on steroids any more.

I understand the economic argument, but the fact is that far too much money goes into subsidizing luxury when it comes to professional sports rather than job creation. Do you get jobs? Yeah. Would you get more if you didn't pay an entire team more than the local neighborhood put together grosses in a year? Most definitely. You don't need to pay them what we pay them given that we dropped millions on their stadiums in the first place--stadiums that now charge far too much for a ticket than most people can afford and are overpopulated with luxury box seats that too few rich people are actually interested in. I haven't seen the figures on what a team brings in, $$$-wise to the neighborhood or the city in general, but I suspect it doesn't begin to recoup our millions of dollars for building not one but two new stadiums. And it won't for many, many years, especially with the economic slow down. By then, they will probably want more from us.

And like I said: I'm not entirely rational about this because I dislike that we throw so much money at these people for so little and then act all shocked when they aren't paragons of virtue. It's like being surprised that the hooker you paid for isn't a virgin--it's not in her best interests to risk losing more money coming in by turning away any options that would keep her in the game for longer. I have similar problems with Congress as I do with pro sports, actually.

Hell, I watch fictional sports once a week! And they have the same problems with steroids that real pro sports does.

And that doesn't bother me a bit because no one is pretending that it doesn't happen. They may not publicize it, but it's an open secret. All the pro leagues act like steroid use is something that happens to other athletes, not theirs. The hypocrisy bothers me. Cases like Benoit's are also the exception rather than the rule--with how pervasive steroid use is, it would be like saying chewing tobacco or the pill cause people to kill their spouses. They can, sure, but most people use them with little to no problem. (Outside problems, emotional problems, etc. can be aggravated by steroids, I absolutely agree, but the reports of "roid rage" are overhyped.)

I also agree with you: make steroid use legal, and develop the shit out of some new drugs. We can use the admitted steroid users as guinea pigs--just promise Mark Maguire he can get back in the Baseball Hall of Fame, and he'll let us do anything we want to him. And, once technology improves enough, why not splice their genes? I want an all-spliced league: Man-cats versus Man-dogs! FIGHT!

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Let's try this again, shall we?

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