I imagine I grew up in a household similar to yours. You know, the standard guidelines that parents of our generation try to instill in their progeny: honor your parents, respect your elders, fear God and take everything Jose Canseco says as absolute truth. No questions asked, right? At this point in time, I think the Jose Canseco commandment is the most important to adhere to in this, the era of steroids.

Hell, I didn’t even read Canseco’s book, but when a player like leadoff hitter Brady Anderson hits 50 home runs in 1996 after having hit only 72 in the previous eight seasons, it doesn’t take a book to make it clear that there has been rampant steroid use in Major League Baseball for years. This brings me to my point: steroids, while harmful to one’s body and detrimental to your sex life, are not as bad as people make them out to be.

I’m an idiot, you say? Well, chew on this for a second: In 1994, during the strike-shortened season, total attendance for the season was right around 60 million. In the years following the strike, baseball had a very hard time recovering, with attendance levels mired in the lower 60 millions.

Then 1998 rolled around. You all remember 1998, don’t you? Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa hit a combined 136 home runs and, coincidentally, attendance shot up to 73 million! Sure, this could have been completely random, but during this same period, 1994-1998, the number of average home runs hit per game also increased significantly, on the order of 1.02 per game in 1994 to 1.17 per game in 1998. In fact, it turns out there is a very high correlation between how many times Chris Berman shouts “back, back, back” per night and how many fans pack America’s baseball stadiums.

If this isn’t making too much sense to you, try to look at this from a simple analogy. Let’s say you are really into early 90′s pop music. Why? I don’t know, but just go along with me for argument’s sake. One day you hear this new group called Milli Vanilli. These two guys are horrible. Sure they can dance, and they’ve got the hair and everything else, but, when you hear them sing, you wish someone would give you a lobotomy. So what does Milli Vanilli do to win the hearts of the American consumers? They hit the metaphorical home run. Milli Vanilli gets three singers with good voices and no stage presence to record their songs for them. Then, all the two talentless schmucks have to do is dance and look good while they lip-synch over good voices. In this particular case, Milli Vanilli went on to sell millions of records and eventually won a Grammy.

This seems a good point to recap-Milli Vanilli sucks; very limited record sales. Milli Vanilli cheats; millions of records sold. This looks kind of like the current situation in baseball, does it not? Steroids provide players with an unfair competitive advantage in terms of strength, stamina and resistance to injury. A baseball player who uses steroids has a much greater chance of exceeding his natural talent (more hits, more power, etc.), and a baseball player who excels is going to get a hell of a lot more money and be held dear in the hearts of his fans. So, at this point, everything is going okay, right?

Wrong! Sure, Milli Vanilli makes a ton of money, cultivates quite a following and eventually wins a Grammy. Get ready for the backlash though. The dreadlocked wonder boys are caught lip-synching on the stage of the Grammys right after they win (“girl you know it’s… girl you know it’s… girl you know it’s…”). They’re screwed, ain’t no wrigglin’ out of this one. Milli Vanilli’s accomplishments are forever tarnished; they have the proverbial asterisk next to their names. Well, that’s exactly what we are experiencing in baseball now, the “asterisk stamping” period. Asterisks next to *Caminiti, *Giambi, *McGwire, *Bonds and *Sosa.

So, what are we, as avid baseball aficionados, supposed to do now? Well, let me finish. After the Grammy is given back, Milli Vanilli is cast out from the musical world, banished from the industry that once provided them with riches and accomplishments well beyond their natural talent levels. What did American music consumers do after the fiasco? They went out a few years later and bought the computer manipulated crap coming out of J. Lo or Ashlee Simpson’s mouths. Lesson learned? Not hardly.

After following that example, what are we as baseball fans going to do after pooh-poohing players like Giambi, Bonds and Caminiti for using steroids? Well, we are going to fall in love all over again with the new crop of players with giant muscles, whoever they may be. With that being said, fans are always going to flock to the baseball stadiums as long as the players are excelling and hitting homeruns into the nose-bleed sections. In a sense, we fans are encouraging steroids by continuing to support this type of cheating. How can something we publicly encourage be so bad?

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