FiyaStarter.com - In The Dining Room With Big Earl

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“I was gonna drive around
the corner and get a blow job.”
-Charles Barkley
Drunk ass political hopeful.

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No this isn’t a formal gathering, it's sports talk rambling (mostly) with America’s resident angry black man, Big Earl at his dining room table where he watches sports on his 13-inch TV and reflects on life. Grab a chair and listen up as Earl pulls back the memories of sports days past almost as feverishly as he pulls back on his lit menthol of choice. You’re now in the dining room and Earl is speaking from the big chair.

Got Blame? Blame Bonds.
by: Big Earl, for Sports

714.

That's the number.

It's a magical number, three digits that separately mean very little, but collectively to many baseball fans, it was and still is the number.

It's the number of career home runs George Herman "Babe" Ruth amassed over his legendary career, and Barry Bonds recently had the gall to eclipse with a shot over the center field fence at Pac Bell Park in San Francisco.

Bonds' feat was met with a standing ovation in San Francisco, the place where his late father Bobby began his stellar career and where his godfather Willie Mays made the blueprint on how to play the game. However, anywhere east of the Bay Area, Bonds' shot was met with apathy, derision and downright hate.

And all I ask is...why?

Surely it can't be because Bonds has presumably used steroids. The same steroids that saved the game of baseball in the summer of 1998. With attendance sagging and lingering resentment from the strike in 1994, the race to eclipse Roger Maris' single-season mark of 61 home runs by good ole Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa gave baseball the shot in the arm - no pun intended - it desperately needed. Never mind the fact that it was painfully obvious that both McGwire and Sosa were juicing, all that mattered was baseball was once again the apple of America's eye. Just for good measure, McGwire not only broke the mark at home in St. Louis, but he did it against Sosa's Cubs. After McGwire touched all the bases, acknowledged the roaring crowd, gave everybody on the field dap and kissed a few babies, here comes Sammy. These bammas hugged it out like Red and Andy at the end of "Shawshank Redemption," then ended it with McGwire's rendition of Sosa's infamous salute. All was well with the game again…and it wasn’t.

Owners, obviously happy with ticket sales and revenue from new contracts with the networks, turned a blind eye to the problem. Union leaders, more concerned with money than the safety and long-term health of the players, turned a blind eye as well. And let’s not even discuss commissioner Bud Selig’s role in this entire ordeal. The people that control the game did nothing about the apparent steroid problem in baseball because the ugly truth was steroids helped the game get back on its feet and even Selig knew that you don’t bite the hand that feeds you.

Today, whether baseball officials, players, fans or whoever would like to admit, steroids are still feeding the game…or that’s what we should be led to believe. If Bonds is vilified for presumably using steroids to break McGwire’s record, why hasn’t there been an investigation into Albert Pujols’ obscene pace of 25 HR’s through the first 51 games of the season? Or how about Roger Clemens, who looked like he was washed up ten years and 25 pounds ago in his last year in Boston, yet has somehow found a way to gain velocity on his fastball and put up mind-boggling numbers well into his 40’s. How else to explain Jason Giambi’s resurrection from a has-been, steroid-using lying sack of shit to once again being the hulking, representative “Everyman” on the Yankees.

It’s them ‘ROIDS!!!

But sportswriters are lazy, sack-chasing suck-ups who wouldn’t dare do any real investigative work on any subject, let alone steroids where a real expose on it and how prevalent it is in the game could ruin relationships between the players and the media for a long, long time. And that’s the only thing many “journalists” really care about. So we get a scapegoat…a surefire Hall of Famer who’s never tested positive, never cared what people thought of him, been dismissive of the media from day one and could care less if you thought of him as a friend or foe and oh yeah, never tested positive.

And to top it off…he’s black. Go figure.

So, here we are; at a point where steroids aren’t the problem. Barry Bonds is a problem because he used steroids. With the news that federal investigators raided the home of Diamondbacks pitcher Jason Grimsley, last Tuesday, as part of the steroids investigation in baseball, more players will be brought into the spotlight as users of performance-enhancing drugs. However, it doesn’t matter who is trotted out in front of Congress, who tests positive, Bonds will forever be the face of the steroids scandal because in the end, it’s always easier to blame a nigga for the problem than actually do something about it.