The Broken Curse was Juiced

If you thought the endless, ongoing MLB drug controversy was underreported, protected old hat bad news unworthy of yes man media, rest assured you won't get that spin here. I'm from the old school that says if you can't play fair, then find a job in crime and not our national pastime.

The latest story to be swept by the wayside by sports beat pundits (it was gone from ESPN.com way too soon) is the 2003 test outing of David Ortiz now joining LA's ManRoid on the growing all juice team from Beantown.

You know, that Bay State ballclub that pulled off the greatest comeback of all time vs. the Yanks in the 2004 ALCS fueled by chemicals and not character. They made a mess of the Cards next. Then followed up in '07 with yet another odd and seemingly effortless Fall Classic sweep.

Sadly, this is close to my heavy heart because I grew up in New England and was lucky to be a baseball fan back when sluggers weighed a buck 80, a 30 homer season was a hoot, cheating meant pine tar too high on a bat, pep pills made oldtimers too nervous to perform and doctored balls were so fair and regulation sized as to not be homerun bound.

On the other hand, PEDs or performance enhancing drugs have turned modern diamond dream heroes into he-men of false buff stats. Moreover, the steep drop in post roid performance of Big Papi has been so dramatic that one has to wonder whether winning in this fake new era of video game offense is superhuman or test tube tainted.

Now gladhanding appeasers of fate and destiny bought and sold in a syringe may beg to differ. But I'm one of the purists who won't forgive the home team if they prove to be rogues with the rules. I would rather have seen a movie about the Red Hose finally winning it all than a reality show fantasy built on prescribed prefab muscle.

This all began after the '94 strike year when the game was globalized or outsourced to a desperate generation of south of the border med studs who filled farm clubs while our domestic pool was somewhat downgraded
without as much makeshift andro talent to compete.

I feel for the game and its integrity. But I also feel for all the MLB sub, utility and role players in the last 15 years
who may have had lackluster careers because those who took their jobs juiced their way to megabuck stardom.

Make no mistake. This is the story that won't go away. Demographics hint as to who is clean and who is not. Yet
when we weed out the majority, we may well come to the conclusion how MLB became a bad neighborhood. For
when it became 3rd world inclusive, druggies dominated.

There is no saving grace in all this but the sour grapesthat players from the land of the rising sun have won the
first two World Baseball Classics steroid free. Either the west learns something from this or it continues on a road of "don't ask don't tell" where cheaters can do no wrong and the art of winning threatens to become an asterisk.

I'd like to pretend cheating is good for long balls and drugs are just part of the game. But I don't have a MLB
image to stand behind and don't want one. For the elite 4th estate, ticker tape news flashes come and go while
scribes like me are left to admit and dwell on the truth.

And the truth is that there are more than 100 other players on that list left who will also be outed to define the steroid era. So stay tuned. In MLB's PED soap opera, the best and worst is yet to come...