I’m not a big baseball fan. I know all the jargon, all the rules, and generally who plays for what team in what city and in what league. But I just can’t seem to get juiced up about a sport where the players make millions of dollars to stand around scratching themselves and spitting most of the time, and where the entire sport literally stops because the players belong to a labor union and decide to go on strike. To get even more money for standing around and scratching for most of the game. While taking steroids so they can spit farther, faster, and more often.

Now it looks like ex-major leaguer Barry Bonds is about to get his O.J. moment in a court of law, with evidence piling up against him that he not only took steroids, but that he’s been committing perjury and lying to the public about it for years. So now that 73 home run season and that 762 home run career of his look more tainted than ever. Those achievements will not only have an asterisk next to them in the record books, but Bonds will always be remembered as the guy who put the “ass” in asterisk.

And now we find out that Alex Rodriguez, the highest paid scratcher and spitter in baseball, has been pumping up his anabolic volume as well. What? A-Rod was supposed to be baseball’s ultimate hero, the one player who could wouldn’t sip from the steroid soup, the one who would rise to greatness on pure talent alone. Just as some fighters used to be billed as boxing’s “great white hope”, A-Rod was being touted as baseball’s “great clean hope”. But it turns out that after years of denying it to the press and the public, the one talent that A-Rod lacked was the ability to “just say no”.

And to make it worse, he’s only admitting it because he got caught. What a hero. This must be the way kids felt about White Sox hero Shoeless Joe Jackson after he threw the 1919 World Series in return for a $20,000 bribe. The saying back then was “say ‘taint so, Joe.” The Black Sox Scandal of 1919 was the biggest stain on baseball until the drug scandals of the last decade came along. And now baseball’s poster boy Alex Rodriguez has landed right in the middle of it. He’s found a way to put the “taint” back in “say ‘taint so”.

Baseball has somehow managed to survive two world wars, numerous labor strikes, the designated hitter rule, and even the players refusal to wear stirrup socks. It’s a teflon sport - bad things just can’t stick to it. But consider the sport of Cycling - it also survived two world wars, and international flare ups, and radical new bicycle technology, only to be nearly destroyed by drug scandals among its athletes. If baseball is going to survive, it’s time for baseball owners and League officials to finally get off their asses and figure out a way to make “winning in the 9th” more important than “peeing in the cup”.