McGwire Admits Juicing

Several people somewhere feign surprise, disappointment.

From the WaPo:

Baseball slugger Mark McGwire admits to using steroids

Mark McGwire's undisputed place upon the Mount Rushmore of baseball's steroids era -- the product of his Popeye arms, his shocking-at-the-time home run records and his infamous 2005 congressional testimony -- always lacked one thing: irrefutable proof, whether in the form of an admission, a positive test or an indictment. And with McGwire living much of his post-baseball life underground, it seemed such closure might never come.

But Monday, 2 1/2 months after his hiring as the St. Louis Cardinals' hitting coach signaled his intended return to baseball -- and about five weeks before spring training camps open -- McGwire emerged publicly again with an admission that was both powerful and thorough, but hardly shocking.
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Baseball is a business in which thousands of people have tens of billions of dollars at stake.

It provides a service which is entirely voluntary -- no one is forced to attend a game, watch one on teevee, listen on the radio, or read about on dead trees -- and yet, as we saw with the case of Tiger Woods, the revenues generated by this utterly unnecessary activity keep hundreds of media companies and secondary businesses solvent.

These businesses dance always on the edge of disaster -- trafficking in fickle, wispy products like yearning and nostalgia, with a public that could so very easily wake up one day and find the whole ritual too ridiculous and ridiculously expensive to play along anymore.

Like every other bubble of the last 30 years, the Home Run Bubble was a perverse outcome created by incentive structures which rewarded bad behavior, punished ethical behavior and placed a premium on secrecy and protecting corrupt institutions.

It is a lesson that we are obviously incapable of learning.