I’m more of a football guy, but I do pay attention to baseball some of the time, and far as I know I’m free to write whatever I please around here (as long as it’s not my usual brand of profanity; that’s too filthy for Zeth’s dainty ears).

This is a steroids rant, so for the 87% of you that are right sick of that crap, by all means, don’t let the door hit you in the butt on your way out.

I’m right sick of hearing this crap. Give me a break. “Oh no!!! My favorites sports hero superstar is using steroids!!! THE HORROR OF IT ALL!!!!” Spare me the bullcrap. This is old baseball writers just finding the best way they could ever have dreamed of to rail against these kids today with their no morals and MY generation was eleventeen times better. Seriously. Like 85% of the guys writing these high-and-mighty rain-down-judgment-on-the-infidels steroid articles have AARP cards, and they’re spewing nonsense like they usually do, and I would like to speak behalf on most sports fandom when I say: SHUT THE HECK UP ALREADY.

I am, like, way beyond serious. Guys, nobody but you cares. Now, you have a column, you have a good gig, people pay you for your half-wit opinions. God alone knows why. So you keep trying and trying to convince us consarned whippersnappers that steroids are solely responsible for the moral erosion of the youth in this country, and we’re going to keep right on yawning in your crinkly faces.

Yeah, there are young guys perpetuating this bologna too. Most young writers–at least, the ones who have gigs at newspapers, as opposed to internet blogs–were first young would-be athletes that didn’t survive the second round of cuts at their small college, and you’d better believe that when an opportunity comes along for them to set themselves up as just so superior to these bastard criminal HGH-crazed players–you know, the ones who starred on the college teams they themselves got cut from–they’re going to do it.

But we don’t care.

How many average fans really give a tinker’s damn whether or not baseball players put steroids in their bodies? Like three percent, maybe? The general consensus, overwhelmingly, is that yeah, I know they’re all doping, but I just like to watch the sport, I don’t care who’s playing it. Some of us–you know who you are, and you really shouldn’t be ashamed to come right out and say it–are wondering just what’s the problem with watching players whose skills are maxed out even more than normal? Isn’t the point to professional sports to watch the very best athletes in the world?

Oh, but the history, the history! We’re desecrating our sacred heritage! We might as well be pissing on Willie Mays’ grave! (OK, OK, Willie Mays wasn’t dead last I checked. Mickey Mantle’s grave, let’s say.) And to be perfectly honest, I don’t freaking care about Mickey Mantle. Never in my life have I felt sorry for Mickey Mantle’s legacy. Give me a break. Be honest with yourself: You don’t really care about Mickey Mantle’s legacy either. You care about feeling morally superior to some guys you’re insanely jealous of. (Or you’re not, in which case you’re in the bigger crowd with me, those of us who would rather just watch sports, thank you very much.) Lord, not only is everyone jacking up on drugs now, but for Pete’s sake, baseball players have been cheating in every way they can think of since like four seconds after Al Gore invented the sport. Seriously, do you know anything about the 1890s Orioles? The guys who got their way by threatening to beat up umpires and occasionally going ahead and following through? The guys who grabbed opposing players’ belt buckles as they tried to round the bases? I know, I know. Rafael Palmeiro’s a much worse human being because he stuck a needle in his butt so he could make ten or fifteen million more dollars.

Do you know what guys in other industries do for ten or fifteen million more dollars? @#$(, man, there are high-power executives all over the place that don’t even blink at cutting on safety knowing that dozens, maybe hundreds of employees and/or customers will die as a result. They don’t care, because it’s putting another ten million dollars in their pockets. And the worst thing you can think of is Mark McGwire took a bunch of HGH? Get a life, man.

Most of us have lives. Most of us don’t really believe any of the cow dung we read in the papers or see on ESPN. We intuitively understand that baseball players taking performance-enhancing drugs is nowhere near the Top 5000 list of problems in the world. The extent of most of our interest is “so, do you figure Roger Clemens has been on the super juice, or what?”

This crap has gone on long enough. I keep a bucket handy so I can safely puke every time I read another one of these self-righteous blame-party pieces that keep popping up all over the place. Listen, you morons, you and I and the Chair and the American people, we all know the same freaking thing: They’re ALL on HGH and steroids! Seriously, does anyone really think that most baseball players, and virtually all football players, aren’t putting every drug in their body they can get their hands on to make themselves a little bit stronger, a little bit faster? Do you know how much money’s at stake?

Look at me. Look me dead in the face and try to tell me that, if you’re in the minor leagues and you have two options, 1. Take some steroids and improve enough to reach the major leagues and their six-figure minimum contracts, or 2. Become a day laborer at a factory near you for $22,000 a year, tell me you’re going to keep your dignity and slave away at Widgets Surplus. Can it, man. You’d take the steroids and bag the money, and so would I, and so would all these clowns raining fire and brimstone down upon all the evil steroid users.

The thing is, most of us don’t really know how comfortable we are, or aren’t, with the fact–not the idea, the fact–that, as time progresses in the modern age, people are becoming steadily less natural and more synthetic. Steroids and HGH are only the beginning, and we know it. We know that by the next generation, genetic engineering is going to start becoming a real factor; we can’t even imagine the kind of drugs that will be available 25 years from now. We know that, in a hypercompetive age where everyone in every industry–definitely not just sports–is seeking every little tiny edge they can find, the slow movement toward more and more artificial ways of improving athletic performance can’t be stopped or avoided any more than the next sunset. Instinctively there’s something we don’t like the idea, something it’s taking us awhile to get used to. But we know one thing for damn sure–if you could stick a needle into yourself tomorrow morning that would cause you, with reasonable certainty, to improve your job performance to the point that your salary would increase tenfold, you would do it. You would do it.

So quit pretending you wouldn’t, and quit pretending that 21 year old Dominicans who didn’t own a pair of shoes until they were 18 shouldn’t. Leave us alone and use your own talents intelligently. You know, like a lot of baseball players do.

The Dragon is a staff writer for SportingGurus.com. His crazy opinions do not necessarily represent the views of the SportingGurus.com staff.