Bif Poppi!

The word is out. Big Poppi added a few chemical compounds to his system and it may have helped him hit the ball a bit further.

That is about as surprising as a birthday party for a six year-old.

Now everyone is yelling about the "integrity of the game." Right, sure.

First, during the last fifteen years, was there any ball player of note who was not taking some kind of enhancers? Jed Lowry maybe. He's hitting .187. Brian Daubach?

But I love the part about the integrity of the game. This is the way the game is played. Any game in America. Did Karl Rove worry about the integrity of the U.S. Attorneys General. AIG didn't seem to have too many concerns about the integrity of the insurance game. How about Enron. Bank of America, Countrywide. United Health Care, which has paid millions of dollars in fines for defrauding Medicare. How about Haliburton? The War in Iraq? General Motors?

Does Fox News worry a lot about the integrity of what they report? Does Rush Limbaugh validate all, or any of his facts?

Even the American Psychological Association has been walking a very fine line about allowing psychologists to design brain-washing and torture techniques to help the government break laws and be unethical to fight terrorism. Integrity?

Lawyers? Do I need to say more? Stock brokers? Mortgage salespeople? Who do you trust? Rabbis selling body parts, priests playing with young boys. Presidents and interns?

How about professors who take Provigil to stay awake and finish journal articles, or students who take Adderol? Is that cheating.Is that OK if you have ADD, but not if you don't. What if you rush off before finals and get an MD ti give you a diagnosis for a week?

Is it OK for me to have that caffeine boost at eleven every morning? Does it make me a better therapist, or would it be more honest if I was falling asleep?
Baseball remains an American game. it reflects our culture. If someone is going to pay you $20 million to hit home runs, you are going to do what you can to hit home runs. You don't think any of the owners knew about McGuire or Sosa? Everyone knew, and everyone liked it.

I was at the game last Friday. Big Poppi came up and hit a fly ball to right. It was four feet short of the bull-pen. If he was juicing, it would have gone out. I paid $80 fuckin dollars for those seats. Can you believe that. $80 for a baseball game. If Big Poppi's had taken those drugs and hit the ball ten feet further, I would have been have been a happy customer. Isn't that what integrity is about? Giving the customer what he paid for?





















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