Wrapped Up Like A Douche

Take Me Out to the WULAD
Wregular WULAD Wreaders know I am a fan of the baseball. As such, I occasionally watch ESPN's Baseball Tonight program, which is, as you might guess, a nightly omnibus of that day’s baseball activity, accompanied by blaring guitar rock.

(Incidentally, I believe this music to be antithetical to the actual pace of the game, and that a hapless extraterrestrial viewer whose entire knowledge of baseball was deduced from this show might get a misguided sense that it is a nonstop, lightning-fast, sexciting sextravaganza, when it is in fact mostly, and intentionally, boring. So by stripping a game down to its action-packed highlights, you defeat its original purpose, which some guy once said was to make summer days seem as long as possible.)

But that is not my reason for speaking to you today.

My reason is this: I used to like Harold Reynolds—which is to say that I liked him on the commercial where they recreate that scene from Bull Durham where the manager says, "eight and sixteen... how the hell did we ever win eight?" and you see Peter Gammons standing there shamefacedly in his towel. It must have been the commercial, because I couldn't possibly have been listening to what he was saying on the show and still viewed him sympathetically.

What he was saying last night, along with the other brainless sycophants on the show, was that in the case of Orioles first baseman Rafael Palmeiro—who you may know from his two notable pharmaceutical proclamations: "I have never used steroids," and "I take Viagra," and who was suspended yesterday for violating the league’s steroids policy after a positive drug test—the blame lay squarely at the feet of Major League Baseball and the Player's Association, for failing to educate the players well enough to avoid accidentally ingesting steroids.

I'm going to run that by you again.

The blame lay squarely at the feet of Major League Baseball and the Player's Association, for failing to educate the players well enough to avoid accidentally ingesting steroids. That's what the lovable Harold "8 and 16" Reynolds was saying. Because, you know, Rafy is a stand-up guy who would never "intentionally" take steroids. (Just like a certain White House official would never "knowingly" disclose the identity of a covert agent.)

Which is funny, because I was thinking that the reaction of most rational people would be that Rafael Palmeiro is a dirty cheating hypocrite who deserves to be kicked out of the game. Am I losing my mind, I thought? Are these mealy-mouthed apologists right, and am I the one who's hopelessly confused on this issue? Could my seemingly logical but obviously insane reaction just be the initial symptom of some Mad Cow-related dementia?

Thankfully, it's not just me.