Excerpt: "A Sad Day"

"Saying you want a drug-free game is an abstraction, buying in to an image of sports, of baseball, that has simply never reflected reality. In the same way that there was no such thing as loyalty before free agency, there's no such thing as clean before testing. If you could turn the Bud Squad loose in 1965 or 1982 or 1993, you'd find what reasonable people know to be true: many hypercompetitive athletes will do anything to be the best, ethics and laws be damned. With testing, with witch hunts, with 800-word screeds, we're trying to hold the present to the standards of the past -- standards that never, ever existed except in our sepia-toned fondest wishes."