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The Jason Giambi bombshell is just that – a bombshell.  Not because it’s shocking that he actually USED steroids.  We all knew he did.  (And by “we”, I mean those of us who chanted “YOU USE STER-ROIDS!!!” at Fenway during every one of Giambi’s and Sheffield’s at-bats this year.)  What’s shocking is that we finally have our smoking gun, which I never thought we’d have.  I think it’s a good thing for fans and for the game to have some closure and some definite admissions on the issue, and it’s ultimately a good thing for the game to now have two absolute poster boys, Caminiti and Giambi, for the long-term damage that steroid abuse will cause (and Mark McGwire is the third poster boy if you’re a savvy baseball fan, but I don’t want to ruin the illusion carried by those idiots in St. Louis that he’s some kind of hero).  A testing system would never have worked in Major League Baseball, for three reasons: Bud Selig has no balls, and even if he did have balls, the Players Association is too powerful anyway, and even if he had balls and the Players’ Association wasn’t so powerful and a good testing system was in place, there’d always be a Victor Conte out there coming up with ways around it.  Any war on drugs will always be a bottomless money pit, because you’ll never kill the demand and billionaire drug dealers will always have more resources than the people trying to stop them, no matter what the drug is (you’ve seen Traffic, right?).  But if you can hurt the demand, well then you’ve got something.  And I’m pretty sure baseball players are going to look at Caminiti and Giambi and decide that maybe they don’t want tumors in their brains or to have their careers ruined at age 33 or to have their nuts shrinking to the size of chick peas and retreating up into their stomachs.  Or at the very least, maybe they don’t want The Nation screaming “YOU USED STER-ROIDS” in their ear every time they hit.

On the other side of the coin, though, this whole steroid witch hunt is, to me, probably another example of the frightening tyranny of our Federal Government right now.  The Federal probe that brought down BALCO coincided nicely with President Bush’s astonishingly strange inclusion of performance-enhancing steroids in his State of the Union address back in January.  By all accounts (including an amazing first-hand account in the May issue of Playboy from the undercover agent who penetrated Bonds’ inner circle) this investigation has been a mess from start to finish in terms of whether it will ultimately bring anyone to justice.  According to the Playboy article, it involved a level of cooperation between federal agencies that isn’t even given to the hugest drug lords of Colombia, and the resources dedicated were unprecedented in the case of a small outfit like BALCO.  On top of that, details from the grand jury investigations have been leaked to the press time after time after time in the past year, which is clearly going to result in the cases against Conte and Anderson being shot to hell.  Conte is going on 20/20 tomorrow to tell “the whole truth”.  When the hell is a person with pending federal charges against him allowed to do that?  When are details of a federal grand jury investigation ever made THIS public?  Well…maybe in cases where the Federal Government’s objective was to make examples of certain people, just because it wants to.  We know this is a high-priority issue for Bush.  He said so in his biggest speech ever.  Conte and Anderson will walk, for sure.  So who are the big losers?  The users, that’s who.  A drug investigation never goes after the users, it goes after the dealers.  So they committed these huge resources to go after the dealers just enough to force the users to testify in completely confidential hearings, but now all the completely confidential hearings are becoming public knowledge and destroying the lives of those who testified.  Personally, I think that was the goal all along.  Use and investigation to obtain details and admissions, then leak them to embarrass the users.  In fact, if that WASN’T the goal, this investigation never would have happened in the first place.

And now, for some comedy:

Since all hell has broken loose on the steroid issue, Gary Sheffield should consider himself awfully lucky that this little wifey-wifey sexy-sexy videotape thing fell into his lap last month.  See, he’ll never hear a single word about steroids at Fenway next year, even though he admitted using them, because the fans will be too busy trying to think up a creative four-syllable way to say “R. Kelly peed on your wife!”  Which, to me, is much more fun.

One highly comical note from the Jason Giambi bombshell that I’ve spent all exchanging emails across the country about:  The nonchalant sentence in the middle of the ESPN story asserting that Jeremy Giambi also testified to having used steroids.  Finally, an explanation for his .259, 20 HR, 45 RBI tour de force in 2002.  Sound off at ESPN SportsNation!  “Should Jeremy Giambi’s statistics be wiped off the books after the admission that he used steroids, or should they be wiped off the books out of pure embarrassment on the part of the teams for which he played?”

(Cue Sega Genesis NBA Jams Announcer: “He’s heating up!”)

Another highly comical note from the story: Jeremy Giambi’s quote about “The Cream”, an undetectable steroid that gets rubbed on the body and leaves you looking like Popeye in the morning. “For all I knew, it could have been baby lotion,” Jeremy Giambi told the grand jury.  (Sheffield expressed similar sentiments in his admission of using The Cream, while also admitting that he paid $50,000 for it.)  I mean, I have to defend Jeremy here.  There’s nothing illogical about going to a secret trainer who asks for your blood samples and ordering up two vials of orally-administered undetectable steroids, a bottle of Human Growth Hormone, two syringes of injectable rocket fuel, and a tube of baby lotion.  Hey, throw in a pack of Tums and some Spongebob band-aids too, would you?  I want to cover up the needle marks.

(There’s a steal by a big-headed Scottie Pippen!)

The Giambi story describes “The Cream” as “a testosterone-base balm rubbed onto the body.”  Now, I don’t know about you, but if a jacked-up bodybuilder handed me a tube of testosterone-based cream and told me to rub it all over my body, I think I’d throw it in the garbage, inform him that I’m not Jenna Jameson, and never go to that trainer again.

( “HE’S ON FIIIRE!!!”)

When he talked about using an unknown balm prescribed by a trainer, do you think the grand jury just cued up a Seinfeld tape and let Jackie Childs do the talking?  “Who told you to use a balm?  Did I tell you to use a balm?  No one knows what a balm’s gonna do!”

Another direct quote from the story: “Jason Giambi described to the grand jury how -- using syringes -- he injected human growth hormone into his stomach and testosterone into his buttocks.”  So just to recap the recent proud history of the New York Yankees:  You’ve got the biggest choke in sports history, you’ve got Sheffield rubbing testosterone-based cream from a tube all over his body, Giambi having testosterone injected into his buttocks, R. Kelly peeing on Sheffield’s wife, Jeter Sucks A-Rod, and Bukkake Matsui.  What the hell is going on over there in the Bronx?  Can somebody get some control?  It’s getting disgusting for the rest of us.

And how come I’m on fire right now and I still can’t figure out a way to connect Brady Anderson’s fifty-homer season with testosterone being injected into the buttocks?

Ah well…I think this has gone far enough.  Glad I could help you through the work day.  But before I go, one more unrelated item:  Many have asked for my thoughts on the Pistons-Pacers melee.  My thoughts are few and simple. Before the brawl happened, we knew of several indisputable truths: The NBA is a shit league; Ron Artest is a complete lunatic scumbag; and Detroit is a shit hole city.  Did the brawl change any of this? 

No further questions Your Honor.