Big Brown and Major League Baseball Have the Same Problem
June 8, 2008 by Sal Marinello
Filed under The Healthy Skeptic
Off steroids Big Brown was just another horse. There are a lot of Major League Baseball players who can sympathize with this equine flop.
Big Brown lost the Belmont in stunning fashion because his personal trainer didn’t provide him with his usual dose of equine steroids. The discussion begins and ends with this reality; what these drugs give, they also take away. It wasn’t the heat in New York; it wasn’t a bad day, horsey biorhythms or any other nonsense that myopic observers – professional and otherwise – come up with. This same line of logic needs to be applied to baseball and the lack of production that we’ve seen so far this season from some big-named, previously high-powered major leaguers.
You see, when a living thing is on exogenous steroids – introduced externally – for any length of time, this living thing’s own endogenous (internal) production diminishes or outright stops. Big Brown’s endocrine system had been compromised by the regular doses of Winstrol and not delivering the regular dose – a grandstanding play by his handlers in the face of public pressure – doomed the presumptive Triple Crown winner. There’s no way Big Brown’s endocrine system could have been able to provide the necessary level of the hormones that weren’t delivered via injection.
Back to baseball. This season we’ve seen a lot of baseball players suffer injuries of all kinds, power outages, slumps and other misfortunes. Overall power numbers are down, and with the summer heating up it’s very unlikely that this trend will reverse. Older guys don’t get better when the conditions get worse and after they’ve played more games.
For the first two legs of horse racing’s Triple Crown Big Brown ran like an all-time great, but that was when he was running with Winstrol coursing through his veins. Off the drugs he was just another horse. We’ve seen the same thing happen in baseball, now people just have to realize it. However, for the current generation of sports fans it will be tough to admit that, more often than not, steroids have made the heroes.
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