A Brief Sports Note

I watched part of the World Baseball Classic yesterday. Cuba vs. the Dominican Republic.

No one mentioned this. The DR guys were BIG. Not just tall, not just muscular. They were steroid-filled freaks. The Cubans? Small, slim, ordinary-looking.

Want to get the fight against International Communism out of this argument? OK. Turn to the previous day's Japan-U.S. game. Same thing. The Americans were juiced (except, perhaps, for Ken Griffey Jr., whose skills continue to fade with age, as nature intended). The Japanese were not. They looked like Cubans.

This is a fact that will not speak its name on sports television. It is very, very easy to tell the juiced guys from the unjuiced ones. Look at them. When your hat size increases, when you start looking like a beer keg, when you start getting better with age rather than worse, it's obvious. You don't have to get them to pee in a cup to know.

You don't notice this as much when everyone in front of you is a steroid-filled freak. But put a team of them against a team of human beings, and it is.