Six Degrees: Peter Grosz and the baseball steroid scandal

Proving once again that you can’t keep a good writer down . . .

For all of you baseball fans out there, the big news lately has been the release of the Mitchell Report, naming some of the biggest (heh) players in the game as users of performance enhancing drugs. (For the non-baseball fans out there, it’s had much more of an “I’m shocked, shocked to discover that steroids are being used in this game!” feel to it.) Since he’s been deprived of his usual bullhorn — i.e. the dulcet tones of one Dr. Stephen T. Colbert’s vocal cords — Colbert Report scribe Peter Grosz has taken his message directly to “the internets”, courtesy of The New York Times.

I Put the ‘DU’ in a Not-so-Dumb Idea for Baseball

The release of the Mitchell report last week dealt Major League Baseball and its fans a serious blow. But rather than wax nostalgic for the good old days when the worst thing a player put into his body before the game was a pint of bourbon, we need to get aggressive and move forward. To use a sports metaphor, “We cannot stop steroids; we can only hope to contain them.”

That is why before the start of the 2008 season, Major League Baseball needs to adopt my plan, the “Designated User” rule.
Much as the “designated hitter” on each American League team focuses exclusively on hitting, the Designated User would be the one player officially authorized to use steroids. Under the rule, all drugs currently being taken by the players on a given team would be gathered together and consumed by that team’s Designated User at the end of spring training. A kind of last-minute feeding before enduring the rigors of the season.

Read the full article here

It looks like I somehow neglected to mention Peter’s previous stint as NY Times “Guest Humorist”; not sure how that happened. Have a look at it here, if you missed it before: “Any Way You Can Vote I Can Vote Better“.

Thanks for the laughs, Mr. Grosz!