A Good Year for the Outlaw

This is not good.

My head tells me this is worse than the steroids in baseball, but my heart tells me steroids are still worse. An NBA ref maybe affecting the spread of a game is certainly not a good thing, but when the league has spent the last 20 years manipulating the draft lottery (I have no proof of that, it’s just long been regarded as the truth) and just as long manipulating which teams made it into the finals (I have no proof of this, either, but the anecdotal evidence I could bring forth is vast), having a ref decide if San Antonio beats Charlotte by 9 or 13 is par for the course. San Antonio still wins, the ref covers his arse. David Stern’s been doing that for years.

On the other hand, when Barry Bonds hits a homer that lands barely over the fence to help the Giants win a game they would have lost if he hadn’t taken ‘roids and thus hit the ball harmlessly to the warning track, and he does this several times every season, well isn’t that just as bad?

Further, the ref point-shaving scandal will be corrected, the league will feel shame and suffer in the media for a few months, maybe a year or two, and then move on, the memories dimming. But baseball fans have to live with the sight of seeing a disgusting cheater have his name atop the most hallowed record listing in all of sports: Career Home Runs.

Still further, since gambling is legal if your not playing the game, the effect of my kid betting on a game is far less harmful to him than the effect of taking steroids because he saw a bunch of idiots do it.

It wouldn’t hurt my feelings if Barry Bonds suffered a career ending injury tomorrow and fell short of Hank Aaron’s mark. It really wouldn’t.