Every Major League Baseball Player is on Steroids

Raul Ibanez does not want you accusing him of taking steroids, especially if your name is JRod and you write a blog called Midwest Sports Fans:

Raul Ibanez of the Philadelphia Phillies is bristling at the suggestion in a blog that his offensive numbers could be the result of performance-enhancing drugs. And he’s perfectly willing to be drug-tested to prove it, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported.

“I’ll come after people who defame or slander me,” he said Tuesday night before the Phillies played the New York Mets, according to the report. “It’s pathetic and disgusting. There should be some accountability for people who put that out there.”

“You can have my urine, my hair, my blood, my stool — anything you can test,” Ibanez said, according to the report. “I’ll give you back every dime I’ve ever made” if the test is positive, he added.

The actual post on Midwest Sports Fans is not what you would call wildly accusatory; in fact, it is well-reasoned, full of valid statistical analysis and, if anything, fair-minded.  All JRod really does is point out that, if you’re 37 and your career high in homers is 33, and you suddenly have 20 by the early part of June, that’s naturally going to make people talk.  It’s the same observation anyone could make anywhere, on a message board, during a major league broadcast, on SportsCenter, in a bar among smelly people with vomit spattered on their Mike Schmidt throwbacks.

The JRod post is so innocuous, in fact, that one has to wonder why Mr. Ibanez would bother addressing it.  Several possibilities enter my mind:

• He actually is on steroids, and his guilt makes him sensitive to what he perceives as an accusation.
• He was paid by JRod to make him a famous blogger.
• He is an idiot.

I’m sure it’s not the second one:  as a blogger, I know that bloggers have no money, and would therefore have no hope of paying off a man as wealthy as Ibanez.  The only thing I could see is, maybe Ibanez has some rare disease whose only cure is a special kind of cell JRod happens to carry in his blood, and he will only surrender some of this magic elixir blood in exchange for internet notoriety.  That does seem improbable though.  More likely, Ibanez is just over-sensitive, and something of a moron.  Clearly, no one ever explained to him that, by addressing the non-accusations of an obscure non-mainstream-media member, the best he could accomplish was to put said wannabe scribe on the map, retroactively lending credence to the blogger’s speculations – which would otherwise have faded from the blogosphere in a few hours, never to be seen again.  Well, no one ever suggested that brains were important to being a baseball player.

Actually, it’s probably not fair to accuse Ibanez of being a flat-out idiot – he probably has a normal intelligence, for an athlete, but is simply not internet savvy.  He probably just doesn’t realize that no one really takes seriously what most bloggers blog, any more than they take seriously what drunks blabber, or chat room denizens hammer out, or John Kruk says on any given edition of Baseball Tonight.  It’s just blog-stuff.  It only gets attention when someone in the wider world responds to it.  What Ibanez did is, in fact, what every blogger dreams of.

And I am no different than any other blogger – I also dream of success earned at the expense of another.  So, having witnessed the good results JRod got with his speculative piece about Raul Ibanez, I now have my own statement to make:

Every major league baseball player is on steroids.  Every last one.  And Raul Ibanez is on double-steroids.  And Bud Selig has sex with goats.

I would now ask all my readers (all 2 of you) to Digg that, Reddit it, retweet it, email it to friends, tattoo it on your forehead – with proper attribution – and anything else you can think of that might help spread it around.  I want people to know who I am.  I want Bob Costas to call me a blight on humanity.  I want Erin Andrews to think I am stalking her.  I want to get hired by Deadspin or, at the very least, Sports by Brooks.

I want clicks, god damn it.