Drugs are a hell of a drug

                                 Is there anything more boring than labor talk?Seriously,men in suits who have never played the game deciding on whether or not one group of millionaires is going to play for another group of millionaires, all the while we sit there ,slack-jawed, wondering if we're going to have to deal with another 1981 or a(God forbid)1994.Man, it makes you almost wanna watch NASCAR(No it doesn't, actually).While I sit here typing this, I catch myself answering my own question...of COURSE there's something more boring than labor talk(almost typed labour...reading too much British lit...),and I'm not talking the whole wide world, or even just entertainment, for that matter(because, if that were the case,The Jersey Shore wins that...some find that show funny, others offensive...I watched 5 min. and almost fell asleep),I'm talking specifically about the realm of baseball, and the winner(loser)is...Steroid talk...

                      Steroid talk is mind numbingly dull;..Did someone take them, did somebody not take them..who cares?I mean, yes, they SHOULDN'T do PEDS, it's cheating, but do I have to hear about it?Can't these people be punished privately,fined,suspended or whatever and not take up half the sports broadcast?Just look at their heads for Godsakes..I could have told you Barry Bonds and Jason Giambi were on them, do we need Jim Rome to do a whole hour on it.And, by the way, drugs have always been in baseball, from the early days of beer and whiskey(yes,alcohol's a drug, no matter WHAT I keep telling myself)to the greenies(speed)of the 50' and 60's, to the cocaine of the 1980's(why do you think there were so many stolen bases then,besides most of the stadiums being on Astroturf...heck,Tim Raines dove head first to avoid breaking the cocaine viles in his back pocket).

                                Notice I didn't mention the 1970's...there a reason for that...oh, there were drugs out there:Pot,booze,Coke, etc., which may have helped or hindered a performance, it's hard to tell, but one drug that clearly can't help you do anything in sports is LSD..I mean, c'mon,it's a hallucinogenic ,made to make you forget where you are and trip...it can't possibly help you and your performance...well, unless your name happens to be Doc Ellis...As some of you may know,Doc Ellis of the Pittsburgh Pirates threw a no-hitter on LSD against the San Diego Padres on July 14th,1970.He didn't mean to have this happen, after all, he wasn't scheduled to pitch that day.And sure, he did walk eight batters,but he didn't allow a hit, and this story really didn't come out until fairly recently, like, say 20 years ago (In his book, entitled "In the country of baseball",Doc claimed he pitched the game with a hangover, which would have made him the 3,701st pitcher to do so.)because, at the time of the books release in 1976, he was playing for the Yankees and their conservative-minded owner George Steinbrenner, who obviously didn't want that kind of publicity for his juggernaut.

                       Now, I don't know if anybody out there has ever tripped(I did...ONCE, and looked what happened...hey I was hanging out in Fitchburg Mass and I was bored), but it's incredibly hard to do ANYTHING productive...I'm always amazed The Beatles,Hendrix,Pink Floyd, etc.were able to make cool music on it(actually,music and drugs go together quite well...except for cocaine, the "bad music"drug, responsible for late period Stones and Zeppelin offerings...on Zep's"In through the out door" you can hear the effect of coke in  Robert Plant's voice...and the disco records of the time also were cocaine influenced...
Anyway, point is, unless you've tried it, you cannot fully appreciate how amazing  a feat this was, as opposed to 'roids and other PEDs...in fact, LSD is probably the world's most performance DE-hancing drug available, at least that's been documented...so unless somebody throws a perfect game on heroin(I'm looking at YOU,Tim Lincecum),Doc Ellis' LSD no-hitter will go down as maybe the greatest baseball drug story of all...and there my friends, is one to grow on....