MAJOR BLOGS - www.majorblogs.net - I come to bury Barry, not to praise him. He was a man of infinite ego, a humorless tyrant and a poor steward of his gifts. He walked a time upon this baseball stage, tasted the sweetness of false greatness, and now, as scripted, he leaves the stage a most tragic fellow. Goodnight, dark prince, and may rafts of ugly media wags sing thee to thy doom.

The Tragedy of Barry Bonds, as it will come to be written, was not that he took steroids. He did. It was not that he was a race-baiting, dye-in-the-wool a-hole of epic proportion. The greatest tragedy of Barry Bonds is that he let MLB chump him to mask a much greater problem: MLB's own drug addiction.

As I scripted for you during the summer in "The Doryfication of Baseball", Barry would make his epic, yet tragic run towards Hank Aaron's record. He did. His trainer, Greg Anderson, now looking at a $4 or $5 million dollar book deal for outing a record-breaker, versus a $1 to $3 million deal for outing an aging superstar, emerged from the Dublin, CA, Federal Correctional Institution. He outed Barry.  Bud Light said they would give Barry Benefit of the profits, er, doubt. They did, and raked in beaucoup bucks from fans watching the "historic" homerun run. The next chapter is the roll-back of Bonds' record, and a televised perjury spectacle in a courtroom near you... Stay Tuned!

Pitcher Joe Kennedy dropped dead at 28 last week. Given the number of teams that he has played for, and the number of physicals that he has taken as a pro player, a freak heart condition that was missed is possible, but it is less likely. While the cause is yet to be determined, his collapse is reminiscent of the ephedra-induced death of Steve Bechler in 2003, who was trying to drop weight quickly.

Still, Bonds' alleged steroid use, and the occasional player death from other substances,  is nothing when compared to the drug addiction of the Major League Baseball (MLB) system.

Outrageous? Perhaps. Who though, other than a player, has the most to gain by steroid use?

MLB makes big dough-re-me on steroid-hyped players. From the home run fest of McGwire and Sosa to the various record runs of Barry steroids smash records, and record runs. Even the controversy over steroids still sells the big three: TV, Tickets and Trinkets.

In an age of great moral relativism, people will turn out to see the controversy surrounding a record run as much as the record itself. A player gets caught using? It's a shame! It's an outrage! It's money!

It is money for MLB. It is money for the media. Win or lose, live or die, banned substances move professional baseball.

Your mission, Jim, should you decide to accept it, is to get bigger and stronger and produce years of spectacular results using any means available to you. Should you, or any of your SI (Steroid-induced) Force be caught or flayed alive on ESPN, the Commissioner will disavow any knowledge of your actions. Good luck. This syringe will self-destruct in ten seconds...

If MLB wanted to stop the practice, they would clamp down, hard. There are ways to stop the steroid stampede cold in its tracks.

Instead of hiring a Bush speechwriter to carefully craft Bud Light's take on Barry Bonds' record run, how about taking the preponderance of the evidence and suspending him before he could have a tatoo-asterisked ball make a black-mark on baseball history?  This isn't court. It's baseball, and the Commissioner's once-God-like powers need to be restored.

How about hiring a Bill Bennett or Branch Rickey as the Commissioner and re-establishing  morals and ethics for MLB?

The same punishing standards of the early 20th century that were brought to bear in 1919 on gambling should be used to deal with the modern scourges of the game:

• Loss of a 40 man roster spot for the remainder of a season for every player, major or minor, testing positive for steroids. No increase in minor league roster size to accommodate for any 40 man player slot removed;
• No outside or third-party trainers that are not  under the control of the major league club which holds the player's contract;
  
• Immediate dismissal of any club employee  providing performance enhancers to a player during the season;
• A ban for life for any player testing positive for performance enhancers on the first positive test.

Sounds harsh? You bet it is. Here is what such stiff penalties do:

• 40 Man roster drops are mostly symbolic unless a club goes into high injury mode or it has a shot at the post season. Be down four or five spots, and it can affect your World Series chances. Knocking out roster slots at the Triple-A level , where most of the lower-40 man roster ends up for the majority of the season, also means that player development is slowed, and the PCL and IL teams are also negatively impacted enough to keep an eye on their players.
  
  
• Teams hiring the player's personal trainers rather than the player makes these trainers accountable to the club and the MLB system, and gets them to watch out for the bigger picture of both the player's career and the team's investment in the player. A small investment considering the stakes for the team and player if they go Barry.;
  
  
• Trainers know who juices. Anyone who doesn't turn in a juicer is destroying the game of baseball anyway. Kicking them out is the least that should be done to them in return;
  
  
• Coaches and managers, over the years, have been alleged by players coming forward to have encouraged the spiked coffee pots, or had a conversation about player performance that might stray into the grey area of what can be done to amp up an arm or a bat. Anyone caught doing this should be made an example by firing them on the spot. Publicly. Send out the message that the blind-eye policy is really over;
  
  
• Bud Light has claimed that the Players Association ties his hands on tougher sanctions for players testing positive for steroids. NONSENSE! The PA can dicker over contracts, but lifetime bans have thus far never been part of their negotiating pervue. The commish, weak-kneed thing that he is, has the power to do it. He's just too jelly-spined to offend any of his owner-buddies and make them eat some super-star's multi-million dollar contract. All it would take is one Pete Rose though, to shake up the whole sport.
  

The fans need to hold an intervention: Gather up your local owners, coaching staff, and trainers and book them all rooms at Betty Ford.

"Really, Mr. McGowan, this is for your own good," the 'Frisco season ticket holders can tell the Giants owner. "You'll be comfortable, and in 60 days you'll develop the strength of character to resist rewarding steroid users. You hate us now, but you'll thank us later."

Exeunt Barry Bonds, stage left. Unfortunately, even with his departure, Major League Baseball is still a 300 player a year junkie without much regard for how it feeds its habit.