It's that time again...

...where I read a baseball book X read 4 months before. Today's book is Game of Shadows - I didn't actually read it, but instead did the books-on-tape thing as I drove across the country. (That's right, I'm back to living in the Boston area.) Anyway, I think I found it more interesting than X did in his review, but I generally agree - not much new there, at least in terms of baseball. Barry Bonds is an ass, all the recent HR records were steroid-fueled, and everyone involved (from the users to Selig to the investigating agents to the reporters) are small-minded and petty. But I enjoyed the non-baseball stuff. Two people came across worse than Barry, which is pretty hard to do: Victor Conte, and Marion Jones. What's stunning about Conte is that he was completely open about his illegal activity: if he weren't such an attention-hungry idiot, the Cream and the Clear would still be in widespread use now, and there would be no test for THG. And that's the scary part: there must be many other drug entrepeneurs out there, who aren't as attention-starved and egomaniacal, that are quietly getting rich by synthesizing other steroids (or HGH analogs) that haven't been yet identified in the drug-testing (or even the pharmaceutical) community yet. That pretty much means that drug testing will never work, and that players (such as former juicers who mysteriously find their power after going "clean") will keep using PED's. Oh well.