NO REMORSE
You don't hear a lot of remorse, do you? You hear a lot of denials and excuses from players. You hear a lot of ''It was B-12'' and ''It was for an injury'' and ``I thought it was flaxseed oil.''
But what you don't hear is ''I'm sorry.'' Why? Because they aren't sorry.
Oh, sure, there are some baseball players who don't like that they were caught. But regretting the reaction isn't the same as regretting the action. Roger Clemens isn't sorry that he extended his career into another mountain of millions that wouldn't have been available if not for the healing health of hormones that kept him playing into his 40s. Sammy Sosa isn't remorseful that he juiced himself from Dominican shoeshine boy to global icon. And all those named fringe players who got help to climb from minor-league buses to major-league pensions and health benefits aren't partaking in regret today about what they did for their families.
Looking for edges is what athletes do. Of course they would use pills and potions to heal and help. The surprise isn't that some would. The surprise is that some wouldn't. Coaches -- who are often former athletes -- sleep in their offices. Ronnie Lott has doctors cut off his finger so he can keep playing. Bill Romanowski took a hundred pills a day, ionized his own water and sent his fecal matter to a lab to make sure his body was working at maximum efficiency. We want our athletes to care irrationally. We just don't want them to care too much?
CHEATING
Baseball's players did what competition-aholics will always do. You can't allow athletes to police themselves, as baseball did. Its like asking piranha to be polite about feeding. When the choice in this cruel and lucrative an ecosystem is between being honorable or losing to the guy who isn't, that isn't much of a choice at all. Especially not when a few more miles per hour on your fastball is the difference between the minor leagues and setting yourself up for life with one contract. So baseball became pro wrestling -- big and fake entertainment. But we knew this long before Thursday. Baseball, it would appear, was the last among us to come to this conclusion. So Mitchell's past 20 months would have been the biggest waste of time anywhere in sports if not for the existence of the Dolphins.
CANSECO, BONDS WINNERS
Thursday's big winners? Jose Canseco, telling the truth even as his entire sport turned into a lie. Imagine that. The guy dancing around in a Speedo on The Surreal Life was the most credible guy in the room. And Barry Bonds, who is less alone today even after being named in Mitchell's pages. Now we know that just about everyone throwing toward Bonds was evidently on steroids, too. And that a whole mess of hitters were using steroids, but only one of them was breaking the home-run records.
Roger Clemens is to pitching what Bonds is to hitting. He is the white Bonds. And it'll be interesting to see if the media goes after him with the same intensity and name-calling with which it has enjoyed burying Bonds. If you want to asterisk Bonds' unprecedented greatness, then you must stamp Clemens with the same stain. Know this, though: Baseball isn't alone here, no matter how alone Bud Selig might have felt Thursday. Football is soaked in this stuff too. Not many humans don't get that kind of large and strong naturally. I asked one former Dolphin recently what percentage of the NFL was using Human Growth Hormone.
''Not that much,'' he said.
What's not that much?
``Twenty-five percent.''
Makes sense.
It is the most natural unnatural thing in the world.
:neener
