Writing the Pine

I’m an optimist. Call me naive but it is who I am. It very well could be a fatal shortcoming of mine but I can’t help to try to put a positive spin on things. So I didn’t study hard enough and did poorly on a test. Well, at least the times I was screwing around and not studying put a smile on my face and made me happy. So I lost a ton of money in the stock market (damn you Lehman Brothers). Oh well. I’ll just strike it rich with my next stock purchase (c’mon Fannie Mae!) I am the same way, or used to be at least, when it comes to steroids and baseball. I like to give the players the benefit of the doubt. When Manny Ramirez was caught using performance enhancers (or female fertility drugs, whatever) I was the stupid douche that really thought he suffered from a limp bat. How could he disrespect the game like that? (Or just be that dumb to take steroids when everyone made such a big deal about it.)

Unfortunately, with every superstar that gets accused of using steroids (Manny, Barry Bonds, Alex Rodriguez, Roger Clemens, David Ortiz, Adam Piatt), a little bit of that optimism gets eaten away and honestly, there’s not a lot of it left. The black eye that is steroids has even broken the most optimistic of optimists in me and that’s saying something. But with all due respect to the Five Tool Player, there is one last hope for me.

Albert Pujols.

(And a special thanks goes out to the Writing Illini for asking why no one chose Pujols. Thanks dick.)

I would be distraught if Pujols was found to have taken performance enhancers. Yes, he put up crazy power numbers – numbers that seemingly only a juicer could put up, but with Pujols, he’s just been that damn good his entire career. There was never a ridiculous spike in his numbers that would tell me he ‘roided. His biggest jump in home runs occurred in 2003 when he went from 34 to 43 home runs. His biggest decline is 17 when he went from 49 to 32 in 2007. A substantial decline I guess and call it the naivite, but I’m giving him the benefit of the doubt. 49 is not an unbelievable number of home runs in a season like 73. The Machine has been the model of consistency on the baseball diamond (BA over .300 and over 30 home runs and 100 RBI’s for 9 straight seasons) and a model citizen off of it. He is extremely active with his Pujols Family Foundation and can constantly be found trying to raise money for the curing of Down syndrome and for the people of his native Dominican Republic. Simply put, Pujols taking steroids would close the book on an entire era where the number of home runs and size of players’ heads (literally and figuratively) reached levels never seen before. I would never believe the statistics of any slugger that played in my lifetime (roughly 25 years) and would have a tough time believing, or caring to believe, the numbers of anybody in the future. I’m not sure I’d care to watch the sport anymore, honestly.

But I don’t want to think about that. I’ll always have faith that Albert Pujols is 100% positively clean. It’s the only way I can look at him.