This is going to sound like a horrible cliché, but there has been a tremendous amount of discussion of steroids in Major League Baseball.  And just when we thought the drama couldn't get any more deafening, Jose Canseco comes out of retirement to play Minor League ball with the San Diego Surf Dawgs. 

There's no question that Canseco is an opportunist, dropping names of other MLB players as having a relationship with performance enhancing drugs just to further his own "interests". But maybe we should've listened more to his blabbering because no sooner had he dropped a dime on Palmeiro did old Raffy pop positive.  Maybe MLB's decades-long deaf ear to drugs gives rise to the whole 'mafia' motif.  Answers to all of these "maybes" can be silenced if we as fans stop demonising fools who pop positive for doping.

Major League Baseball's Johnny-Come-Lately stance on doping, while way overdue, is still the law of the diamond: 1st offense 50 games, 2nd offense 100 games, and then a lifetime ban.  But we in the real world know that the penalty lasts much longer in the court of public opinion.  You can bet diamonds to doughnuts that a player returning from a 50-game suspension will be boo'ed out of the park for perhaps the rest of the season.  Why?  Because we as a stupid public leave no room for MLB players to be stupid, too.

It is our venomous response to steroids that empowers a publicity-hog like Canseco.  If we would just accept that a busted player bricked, gets hammered, and then just plays ball, then there would be NO drama with respect to Canseco's posturing.  But Jose banks on our hatred of the very word; he feeds like a vampire off the blood we want from Barry (who really hasn't done anything besides be a sourpuss) or Raffy (who lied to our faces with a wagging finger.)  

Maybe if we just discipline and punish, and put some faith in the rehabilitation of a wayward knucklehead who decides to juice, we can get back to the love of the game.  I thought that's what it was all supposed to be about.  But perhaps that's another horrible cliché.