Life as a Moron must be difficult...

I've been a moron on several occasions throughout the span of my life. Doubtless I will stray into that unique level of incompetence again, and probably within the next hour or so.

I do, however, strenuously avoid being a career moron. A lifer. Gene Wojciechowski apparently doesn't share the same level of concern as I do.

He threw out an article here explaining the finer points of why he would not let either Mark McGwire or Sammy Sosa into the Hall of Fame.

Not a new argument, to be sure, and this article breaks absolutely no new ground in the discussions surrounding any of the convicted/suspected steroids users from the last 10 years or so. So, why read it? Because it's great fun to see people hang themselves with their own rope.

This is the part that really got me:

There are hitters in the Hall of Fame who likely used corked bats on occasion to add to their numbers. There are pitchers in the Hall of Fame who almost certainly loaded up the ball once or twice (or more) during their careers. But prescription baseball is a level of cheating so obscene, so arrogant in nature (and yet, conveniently ignored by MLB and the players union during glorious 1998), that it prompted a congressional hearing.

So, Mr. Wojciechowski is perfectly fine knowing there are other players in the Hall who cheated in other ways to unknown effect, yet draws the line at McGwire's and Sosa's potential drug use. Cheating is okay as long as you use guile, but not with drugs.

Excuse me. What the fuck?

This line of reasoning is so asinine I literally shudder to think there may be others who think this way. Truly, cheating is a black and white thing. Cheating bad, not cheating good. I don't care the form, and neither should he. Cheating is morally reprehensible, period, but now the steroid jargon has gotten so out of control that we have people saying that corking a bat to hit better or scuffing up a ball to gain an unfair advantage isn't THAT bad when compared to drug use...drug use that, by the way, wasn't even banned.

I refer to something I wrote in the infancy of this blog right about a year ago -- while steroid use is wrong and should be banned, and punishments for breaking that ban should be harsh, is it really that different than what us working shmucks do every day to get by?

Energy drinks. Coffee. Pain pills. We put things into our bodies everyday that just aren't meant to be there, and four out of five times we're doing it in a work-related capacity. Feel better, more alert, have more energy, all in an effort to perform at a higher capacity than we would have had we not ingested any taurine, caffeine, or B-12.

It seems to all be a matter of degree for Mr. Wojciechowski. Drug use is such a large commitment with such far-reaching effects that it apparently crosses a line with him, while marking a baseball to make it move in ways it wouldn't normally is a small, one-time commitment. Nevermind that anyone using drugs ~still has to work extremely hard to net anything positive from the drug use~, while a guy who scuffs a baseball doesn't have to do a damned thing except find something with a rough surface, hide it in his glove, and rub the baseball for a few seconds.

Sure. That makes sense. Let's be glad Mr. Wojciechowski doesn't have a vote for the Hall, and let's hope he never gets one. Besides, he's too busy being a moron, and that's a difficult thing to maintain on a daily basis.