Small hitter, big problem
When even Theriot raises suspicions, baseball's earned cynicism
Sorry, Ryan Theriot, you're a suspect. Forget Manny Ramirez and Roger Clemens and Barry Bonds and Jason Giambi and Mark McGwire and all the other hulking, accused performance-enhancing drug users.
You, sir, all 5-11, 175 pounds of you, are doing devious things.
To wit, Theriot -- no disrespect, but if he's 5-11, I'm 6-12 -- hit two home runs Wednesday night at Wrigley Field against the Padres, giving him five times more home runs in 33 games this year than he hit all last season.
Brrinnnng! Eee -- ah! Eee-ah! Zzzt! Zzzzt!
That rings the steroid/HGH/ whatever-designer-drug-is-in bell, doesn't it?
Well, yes, ''The Riot'' hit only one dinger in 2008 and only five so far this year.
But if he were, say, Manny Ramirez (37 home runs in 2008), he would have just hit his 185th homer of 2009.
OK, the math is ludicrous. The whole proposition may be ludicrous. In fact, I'm pretty sure it.
But this is what baseball has wrought.
This is what we tried to tell Bud Selig and Donald Fehr and all the head-in-the-sand executive clowns for years and years would happen if Major League Baseball and its union left athletes to their own devices, acting as though crazy numbers came about just because eating and lifting had become trendy.
No, steroids and their buddies have been around for decades.
If you think Clemens, on the stump once again to prove his doping innocence, didn't use some kind of body-building sauce en route, then you should go watch a movie like ''The Wrestler.''
In that flick starring Mickey Rourke as a broken-down, heart-damaged wreck of a performer, the drug-dealing muscle man who supplies Rourke's dope needs is portrayed almost as a decent guy just working a job.
Body-building drugs work.
And in the pro wrestling world all the guys take them -- check out the heart attack rate among that group -- and that's because ... they work.
And because they work, baseball sluggers like Manny Ramirez will claim they were somehow tricked into taking them, when they are actually willing conspirators.
''Recently, I saw a physician for a personal health issue,'' Ramirez, suspended for 50 games for doping, said in a statement last week. ''He gave me a medication, not a steroid, which he thought was OK to give me.''
Puh-lease.
Human chorianic gonadotropin (HCG), a women's fertility drug is just what every ballplayer needs! If he's trying to have babies.
Because the players themselves for years have been doing their code of silence thing, telling us all to butt out with the questions, they have brought this suspicion of all things grand upon themselves, as well.
There are books that have been written and new ones coming out -- American Icon: The Fall of Roger Clemens and the Rise of Steroids in America's Pastime being a fresh one coming out -- and none of the charges in any of the works have been proven to be as full of fabrication as the 'roid-users tales themselves.
''There had been one injection in the Yankee clubhouse, near the Jacuzzi,'' write the authors of American Icon, four veteran reporters for the New York Daily News' Sports Investigative Team. They are speaking of but a single steroid injection that trainer Brian McNamee gave to Clemens. There were, they write, many others.
Clemens is a fraud, like Alex ''A-Roid'' Rodriguez, and ever so many baseball heroes.
Indeed, who is clean among any of the men who hope to be enshrined in Cooperstown some day? Even those that don't?
We say that certain players -- Ken Griffey Jr., Frank Thomas, Jim Thome among them -- were/are certainly clean.
Why? We have our reasons. Griffey was always breaking down, Thomas testified to Congress about drugs via videotape, Thome is ''country-strong.''
In this era, what the hell does any of that mean?
A federal judge wanted to send Game of Shadows authors Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams to prison for leaking facts about BALCO chief and super-drug witch Victor Conte and his prime experiment, Barry Bonds. Those two investigative journalists were actually sentenced to jail, under appeal. For telling the truth.
So do I have a lot of sympathy for a sports world that makes little Ryan Theriot a suspicious guy for hitting five balls out of the park?
No. I do not.
What's the old saying -- you reap what you sow?
When you plant cheating, Major League Baseball, cynicism will be your crop.