I know, I know.  Who'd have ever thought of the AntiChrist as coming from Katy, Texas?  I myself always pictured the AntiChrist as a foreigner of some kind, some one sort of oily looking like Nicholas Sarkozy.  But, come to think of it, things have been getting  stranger and stranger ever since the AntiChrist made his first appearance at Fenway Park in Boston, Massachusetts in 1984.  I never thought  that Friendly Fenway seemed anything at all like the mouth of Hell, since I have been reliably informed  that it freezes over at least once every winter.  Yet it seems we are definitely in the End Times.

Senator George Mitchell's laughable report  on the use of performance- enhancing drugs in Major League Baseball cost the long suffering taxpayers of this country 30 million smackeroos.  I don't know why the man bothered.  He could have gotten more accurate information by talking to Jose Canseco, reading a few copies of "Muscle Mag" and firing off an e-mail to "Let Us Have Peace".  This probably would have cost $35.86 and taken about 20 minutes.  For, of course, it was "Let Us Have Peace"which has been straight  with the public about the use of performance-enhancing drugs in professional sports right from the start.  In point of fact, we identified the AntiChrist, using his initials "RC" as a steroid user over two months ago.  If there was ever anything which showed the idiocy of having a group of elected officials and a central government it was the expensive and inaccurate nonsense that Mitchell put out.  In the first place, it barely scratched the surface of the amount of drug use by ballplayers, and in the second place it reinforced the nonsensical notion  that if you take a few Dianabol your brain falls out, or you get heart failure.   Can steroids be dangerous if taken foolishly, or by someone with no knowledge of how to take them?  Sure.  So can any drug.  Do you know that the major cause of liver failure in this country is the mixing of Tylenol with alcohol?  Do you expect Sen. Mitchell to release a report on Tylenol use any time soon?  I sure don't. 

Do you know the only way to eliminate all performance-enhancing drugs fron Major League Baseball?  Do what the AAU does.  Give all the players lie detector tests.  "Roger Clemens, have you taken any performance-enhancing drugs in the past six months?"  Yes or No?  Sen. Mitchells' stupid suggestions will do nothing.  The suggestion I liked best came from some ignorant columnist who suggested that all the steroid users on any club would be an isolated clique and that the best way to get steroids out of the sports world world is to "let the players police themselves".Join the real world, buddy.  If there are any non-steroid users on the club, which is extremely problematical, it is probably they who would be in the clique, and shunned by the mainstream.  After we try this pointless exercise, we can put foxes in charge of hencoops and mandate that all school buses be driven by convicted pedophiles, probably with the same wonderful results. 

Of course the larger question about the performance-enhancing drug problem in MLB is: why bother to do anything about it at all? You will never manage to eradicate it no matter what. The chemists will always be one jump ahead of the testers. You notice the focus in Mitchell's report on Clemens, whose career was probably over anyway, and the complete lack of any mention of Alex Rodrigues, "A-Rod", known as "A- Fraud" by those in the know, who has many profitable years of playing time ahead of him. The cynicism and money grubbing by the MLB officials and the Players' union is too sickening. Leave performance-enhancing drugs alone. Let them be administered to the players by doctors. Let the players who want to take them take them. Focus on the players' health and steroid abuse, not use, which are two totally different things. I also hear a lot of talk about youngsters taking steroids and that they will want to emulate their big-league heroes. A real, professional "stack" of HGH, steroids, insulin, and clenbuterol costs about $5000.00 a month. I can't believe that there are a lot of kids out there with that kind of pocket money. If a child gets a hold of a few pills at the gym it is of course not a good thing for him to take them, but the amount of pills that the average youngster could afford to buy will be unlikely to do him any permanent damage. Placing the steroids in the hands of doctors and getting them out of the gyms and away from the drug dealers will more likely make it harder for youngsters to get their hands on them, not easier. Remember the wonderful successes of "The War On Drugs"? No drugs in any high schools in America, right?

In this way we can all relax, knowing that we have a true level playing field where exposure as a steroid user is not based on not being clever enough to beat a test, or having outlived one's usefulness to a sport or a team, or not being a good enough liar. We can just sit back and enjoy baseball. It's a game, Goddammit.

But the Devil is always in the details.