The Mitchell Report

I am thrilled that Roger Clemens got busted. I have a lot of conflicting opinions about whether or not players should use steroids in professional baseball. Some of them are below, and you can word search all my other conflicting opinions on this site.

However, it offends my sense of reality that Roger Clemens keeps on denying that he uses steroids. Just like it offends my sense of reality that Barry Bonds claims to pay trainers hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to buy him special flax seed oil ($7.98 at The Vitamin Shoppe) to rub on his body.

It is nice that I am not totally crazy, and that 40-somethings cannot truly do what Bonds and Clemens have been doing.

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As a matter of labor economics, the owners don't care if the players juice. The more players juice, the more likely that a less rich, less smart team is going to get a good player.

If the players didn't juice, there would be a much smaller number of players worth having at any given time. The Red Sox or Yankees would sign half of them. The Mets-Cardinals-Dodgers-Tigers-Angels-Cubs would have half of the remaining half, and the rest of the league (22 teams) whould split the bottom 25% among themselves. And those good players would cost much dinero. Better to have more players to choose from.

The only reason the owners care about steroids is that they were embarrassed by Congress and a few shrill sportswriters into caring.

It is hard to believe that the fans care too much. They just want their teams to win.

The only people who should truly care are the players, since they are the ones taking the health risk.

It is unclear that there are enough clean players who care. If there are, this would be a good time for one or two of them to say something.

In a rational world, with a true union shop, the Players Association would run its own drug program, and suspend players itself, based on its own sense of what is appropriate, subject to collective bargaining, and Major League Baseball verification.

The owners and the television networks would scream bloody murder when the union winds up suspending superstars along with scrubeenees. And the Republicans would complain that junkie ballplayers should be free to contract wherever they want under right-to-work rules.