As the fallout from former Senator George Mitchell's report on steroids in baseball continues, I have some questions that neither the report or the debates taking place on radio and television airwaves appear to be concerned with. The first question is why baseball?

It would seem that basketball players would have just as good of a reason for using steroids as their counterparts. The salary boom in the late 80s and early 90s that made getting a competitive edge increasingly more desirable in baseball was also occurring in basketball. For the first eight years of his career Michael Jordan was making less than what Jerome James or Darius Miles get paid to stay away from their teams. Similar to baseball, as late as 1988 cracking the million dollar salary threshold was also an accomplishment in basketball. It was not until the early 90s that the heralded draft classes of 1983, 84, and 85 that delivered Jordan, Charles Barkley, Patrick Ewing and Hakeem Olajuwon into the NBA began getting paid anything comparable to what current NBA players are making. It would seem then that with this in mind a player such as John Salley who was often too thin to guard the dominant centers and power forwards, but who was a very good athlete in his own right, would have had a lot of incentives to use steroids or other performance enhancing drugs that were on the market. Wouldn't steroids have at least given Mark Eaton a chance to extend his career a few more years? As crazy as this might sound, but should the players accused of taking steroids at least be given some partial credit for their hubris?

The second question is why are people so up in arms about Barry Bonds possibly having a competitive advantage over Tim Wakefield, or Roger Clemens over Orlando Cabrera when in the grand scheme of things, Bonds and Clemens were always great players. Let me put it this way, if the public is going to demand that asterisks be put next to records set by players accused of using steroids, then should we not have asterisks placed alongside the applications of high school students who receive SAT training, and other competitive advantages that are not available across the board? The level field that we are saying was tarnished in baseball has never been there in other facets of American culture, yet most of us are comfortable going about our daily lives without voicing any complaints.

Thirdly, isn't it slightly disingenuous of sports writers and sports radio personalities to serve as the moderators in the town hall discussion on ethics in sports? People whose profession allows them to question the heart, integrity and intellect of athletes with very little recourse appear to be somewhat culpable in this entire fiasco. Faced with the option of getting raked over the coals in the press and thus having the public turn against them, or taking steroids, it makes sense why some athletes would take these drugs. Additionally, it seems odd that the same people who are now saying that they knew this all along, are the only ones now shaping the terms of public scrutiny.

Finally, what precisely is it that Bud Selig do as Commissioner of Baseball?

A few months ago I posted this entry on the steroids scandal in baseball where I implied that Roger Clemens may have been juiced as well. While George Mitchell’s recently report does not confirm any of these superstitions, it does reinforce my argument that hitters such as Barry Bonds were not the only ones using performance enhancing drugs. What makes Clemens’s case seem so egregious if confirmed is the complicity of owners who kept on bringing him back to outlandish salaries over the past three years even though simple logic suggests that a pitcher of his age and skill set should have seen their skills severely diminished. It goes without saying that baseball's troubles will only get messier over the next few months before it gets better. Still, one has to be disheartened that in spite of all the controversy and sportscasters claims that fans will turn on the sport and these athletes, baseball posted 6 billion dollars in revenue this past season. Therefore if anyone wants a reason why owners have done very little to curtail the permeation of steroids in their locker rooms, we now know that they have 6 billion reasons.

As I watch the news unfold around the senseless murder of Washington Redskins safety Sean Taylor a series of grim thoughts are entering my head.  If Taylor’s murder was an isolated incident than it would be easier to process.  There would be less of a urge on my part to think critically at what happened, because one can only do so much to avoid the unexpected.  

Like most sports fans and the general public it’s his murder that has brought Taylor’s life into focus.  We are learning that many of the images that brought him to fame were a blend of his actual superlative talents as a football player, and a mishmash of conclusions drawn about young men elicited from a mishmash of preordained stereotypes.  That the truth about this young man’s life comes about after he’s passed on is not surprising.  This unfortunately is a very common occurrence.  

What we do know for sure is that Taylor was accidentally murdered during a burglary attempt at his Miami home.  Four suspects have been arrested and detained, and over the coming weeks and months the lives of these four men, all of whom younger than Taylor, will receive due scrutiny.  One ESPN report alleges that one of these young men worked as a gardener at Taylor’s home, and another, is the cousin of a man who Taylor’s sister is currently dating.  This matted helix of allegation and truth, distance and proximity will unravel soon enough to give the officers in the case the necessary information.  

Sure, someone is out there has already penned the piece blaming hip-hop, and I’m sure that black youth culture is being explicitly and implicitly critically derided on airwaves throughout the country.  

There is a pop-cultural elephant in this room, but in my mind it ain’t hip-hop.  The more that I think about Taylor’s death and the recent spate of break-ins that have also befallen basketball players Antoine Walker and Eddy Curry, it’s hard to get the MTV show Cribs out of my head.  When it was first introduced Cribs was a pop-culture phenomenon.  It took the blueprint of Robin Leach’s Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous and made it hipper and more accessible to young people.  One of the first things that my friends and I noticed during Cribs’ early days in the aught was the huge discrepancy between the accommodations of professional athletes and their hip-hop peers.  On end of the spectrum were the lavish abodes of NBA players Penny Hardaway and Jayson Williams, and on the other end was Redman’s legendary modest abode.  As the series wore on the homes started looking alike and the celebrities appearing on Cribs became increasingly self-referential, making their own allusions to other homes that had been profiled.  More recently it seemed as if MTV had exhausted its roster of celebrities to profile, and after a while indoor basketball courts and plasma TVs were no longer new—in other words the thrill was gone.  

Having become overly familiar with the appointments of celebrity home, it was only a matter of time before criminals got the idea to start robbing them.  Cribs had provided thieves with a blueprint of what a celebrity’s home would look like, what kinds of furnishings it’d contain, and how to maneuver through the space.  The show inoculated a generation of young adults with a level of materialism, greed and envy, that as the tragic death of Sean Taylor has shown us, is finally beginning to rear its underbelly.