Steroids in baseball...no?

OK, who was really surprised to hear that athletes are willing to use performance enhancing drugs in order to earn millions of dollars playing a game? The only surprise here is that there appear to be one or two players who didn't use the drugs. They probably just didn't have the right connections.

In the early 1980's, HGH was popular with body builders because its reputation was that with the right training you could add 25 pounds of muscle mass to your body. The only knock on the drug was that it sometimes caused bones to re-calcify, which could mean your jaw would get bigger, you feet might get bigger, etc. See Tom Potts (1980's body builder and Barry Bonds 1990-2000's base-baller). Hands, feet, jaw, head, don't normally just grow in your thirties. Such growth is typically associated with an infusion of hormones that can have natural causes (pregnancy) and artificial causes (hormone replacement or supplement). Unless Barry and Tom were pregnant, they were probably supplementing body with hormones.

When the heat was applied, a few athletes decided to take the "high" road and admit their use. Jason Giambi was one of the first. Now their are more. And good for them. This doesn't make them heros, it makes them human. But no worries there. You can't be a hero by swinging a baseball bat or catching a football anyway. That is merely entertainment.

Still, in an industry that trades on pseudo-hero worship, we should credit those athletes who are willing to behave like human beings, take responsibility for their actions and move on.

For those who continue to lie in order to protect their pseudo-hero status, I can only hope that their fall from grace is as ignominious as their rise - on the foundation of illegal performance enhancing drugs.

To all the athletes out there, America doesn't really care if you used drugs. But lying to us just insults us, and we don't like to be insulted.