The Obligatory Troy Glaus Steroids Post

So the steroid controversy has finally touched Toronto. Well... that is, if we don't count Roger Clemens, Brad Fullmer, Jose Canseco, Billy Koch, Shawn Green, Raul Mondesi, Tony Batista, Benito Santiago, and most likely some guys who are a touch more beloved by local fans.

Whoopty fuck. Stop the presses! Baseball player takes steroids!

OK, yeah... I have a powerful impulse to be completely disinterested by this story at this point, but for a couple of reasons, I just can't.

For starters, it's too important. While my attitude about drugs is more than a little, uh... liberal (cavalier?), there's little symmetry between steroids and purely recreational drugs. I mean, for most kids the lure of pro sports riches likely outweighs the lure of growing up to be able to keep your shit together while on K-- handy though that skill may be. The competitive aspect of the steroid problem puts it in a wholly different category.

I've heard the argument that players should be allowed to take whatever they want-- with even some quasi-reasonableish justifications-- but saying shit like that is just a superficial way bypass a complicated problem. There are more than enough highschool douche bags with delusions of sports stardom that it ought to be crystal clear why this kind of shit ought to be taken extremely seriously. And it's not even that I honestly I give much of a shit about those sorts of morons dangerously experimenting with their developing bodies... I mostly just figure that highschools have enough raging testosterone fuckwads as it is.

Baseball's fifteen years of tacit acceptance, the NFL's puny four game suspensions, and hockey's blatantly retarded "good Canadian boys don't do that stuff" posture just show that there are still miles to go before these sorts of drug and hormone cocktails can even come close to being rooted out of athletics. We'll never see them completely disappear, but a much clearer message absolutely must be sent: anything that nudges people into taking powerful, unprescribed drugs for any reason other than the sheer enjoyment of it should be stopped!

Unfortunately, it seems impossibly difficult to overcome the mountain of apathy coming down on our heads from the realization that we're only seeing the tip of the fucking iceberg. Unless, of course, the offender is a dick. Or going full bore at a pair of the most famous records in sports. Or the fucking gold medal champion of juicing. Then for most of us apathy kinda goes out the window.

Let's put aside our concerns about proliferation for a second and face facts: Barry Bonds juiced better than anybody. Ever. Period. He makes Canseco look like a cheap, talentless hack. It's fucking performance art. And despite it being incredibly obvious what he was doing, nobody's really been able to nail him to the fucking wall in the kind of way that would give someone like Bob Costas a four-alarm boner. Oh, they've tried. And they've got him pretty good. But they've never knocked the cover off him and watched him sail for thirteen seconds out into the middle of McCovey cove while 30,000 people erupt in frenzied cheering and fireworks light up the night sky over the Pacific.

Few, it already seems, will reserve the same kind of indignation for Glaus. Or Jay Gibbons. Or Rick Ankiel. Or whoever's next.

It's rumoured that names have started leaking to be used as leverage towards getting players to open their mouths about these operations. Unfortunately the threat of shaming slowly diminishes as the public comes to believe that just about everybody was on the fucking stuff anyway. Perhaps that means the opportunity to make real change, to cause real outcry, has already passed, and public apathy will give the juicing industry enough breathing room to get a few more steps ahead of the tests and investigators. Maybe being in Toronto makes it too difficult to gauge the reaction, but from this vantage it seems like far less is being made of Glaus or Ankiel or Gibbons than was made of Rafael Palmeiro, or even Gary Matthews. The shock and awe of it has waned.

That's certainly what the reaction of Glaus's teammates implies. Though the Globe's crusty old Jeff Blair, quite rightly, said yesterday on Primetime Sports that the way the Jays have failed to jump to Troy's defense "says a lot about the team", I don't buy the ominous "bad clubhouse" tone he places on it. The Jays are a tight lipped organization when they think it's in their interest, and I don't find it at all surprising that they've met these allegations with little more than mild bewilderment. Nor would it surprise me if the direction came from upstairs. Whatever the case, the Jays seem content mostly to yawn until the storm passes. Which sounds a whole like pretty much everybody else.

Of course, part of the reason it's unsurprising is the fact that any statement a player makes about steroids could ultimately come back to haunt him (especially if... you know), but it's still disheartening... I guess.

As for where I stand on Glaus himself, I don't really know. Part of me can't help but ask, at what point does cheating become levelling the playing field to keep up with all the other cheaters? Yet, I'm sure that on this site I've called Barry Bonds a roided up douche bag, so to be fair I guess that means Troy is a roided up douche bag too. Sorry everyone.

But I'm not going to boo him tonight, or any other night. I might not feel the same thrill when he crushes his next home run for the Jays, but I won't boo. I'll let the fans in other cities take care of that. Why? Because he's our roided up douche bag, and sooner or later-- if they haven't already-- every baseball fan is going to have to come to terms with their own roided up douche bags.

And when we're finally done that, we should all probably apologize to the fans in San Francisco. Then boo the fuck out of Barry Bonds.

That's because-- and this is the thing (and maybe Giants fans have known it all along)-- shitty as it is, hypocrisy totally kicks the shit and balls out of misplaced apathy every day of the week. And then it shits on its balls.

Giants fans ought to boo the fuck out of Glaus like we'd boo the fuck out of Bonds, like Red Sox fans ought to boo the fuck out of Giambi and Yankees fans out of Lowell. And like everyone should boo the fuck out of Sammy Sosa. But for fuck sakes, don't turn that criticism inward on yourself! That's not what being an obnoxious jackass at a ballpark is all about!

Come on, Jays Fans! Let's not let the fact that we're being hypocrites get in the way of what's right!