First of all, when I say “shut up,” that goes for everyone. George Mitchell: shut up about your go-nowhere 22-month crusade that turned up nothing more than a few signed checks and Josias Manzanillo. You did absolutely nothing that a high school graduate with internet access couldn’t do in about 1/22nd the time. ESPN: shut up about the “tragedy” that this report brings – this isn’t Hiroshima or Little Big Horn or either one of the towers. Hell, this isn’t even Joe Theismann getting his leg broken. Carl Pavano popping a hemorrhoid has more emotional juice behind it than this pooch-screw. Listening to Buster Olney last week on ESPN Radio claim Wally Joyner was peer-pressured into taking steroids to get his power back almost made me spit up my venti double-mocha caramel latte! (For the record, I was only listening because my idiot brother Hal thinks Mike & Mike are actually funny. It’s pretty clear which of us got our dad’s brains, that’s for sure).

Hell, the whole sports media should shut up. Some guys couldn’t wait to throw former Yankee great Roger Clemens under the magical mystery steroid bus. I’m pretty sure Yahoo!’s Dan Wetzel ended up with his stomach in his balls trying to post the first “CLEMENS IS EVIL” column, while other clowns tripped up over each other’s pill-powered boners trying to one-up the overblown rhetoric. All I know is: all you uptight moral Bible-thumpers riding Bonds’ acne-scarred back for the past 3 years in your columns better shit or get off the pot if you’re going to continue to claim that steroid users deserves an asterisk and a Hall of Fame snub and all that garbage.

And you know who needs to shut up the most? The fans! Yeah, that’s right, the fans, with their “oh, we want the game to be PURE and FREE OF DRUGS!” Here’s a newsflash for the fans, the owners, the executives, and anyone else that’s had their head up their ass for the past, oh, 100 years: cheating and baseball know each other in a very Biblical manner. It’s called “gaining a competitive advantage.” If you get caught, you should get punished, but if you can get away with it, who the hell cares?

I don’t care if current Yankee great Andy Pettite shoots up with heroin before every start, stabs stray puppies on off days, and has sex with a Tom Brady Fathead – if he can get us into the 7th every 5th day with a lead, I’m happy, as long as he doesn’t get caught! If 300-game-winner Roger Clemens wants to make yet another June comeback, I’ll gladly welcome him back into the fold if he promises to not pitch like grass-filled dogshit. And if that means more needles in the ass, then I’ll pump him up my damn self! And if you seriously think that jug-eared bow-legged lump Posada isn’t doing something illegal to hit over .300 as a catcher, then I will personally pay for your CAT scan and a Hooked on Phonics CD set. We won with guys on the juice, we won with guys on greenies, and we won with guys shoveling fifteen-foot snowdrifts up their nose. The key thing is WE WON. Wake me when MLB turns into a whiny two-faced bitch like the NCAA, and actually asks for their hardware back.

Winning is never pretty, but fans want to believe that it’s all done with hard work and compassion for your fellow man and being some sort of gutty Jeterian myth of a man. The fact is that winning takes needles in the ass, arms, between the toes, under the eyeball, and anywhere else you want them shoved. It takes knowing that sometimes you need more than what’s under your skin and in your heart to get that winning run home, especially given how much cash these guys get nowadays. Baseball players that just make it to the major leagues get at least a couple hundred THOUSAND dollars just for dressing up & sitting on the pine next to the batrack – they’d better do what they can to earn their pay. And is there really a difference between scuffing a baseball with a beltbuckle and using a little chemstry? The drive behind both acts is the same – the desire to win.

And don’t give me that “oh, these STEROIDS meant that us CLEAN players couldn’t break into the bigs” nonsense. Save it for one of Rosenthal’s ill-informed rumor columns. You want to know why Wally Joyner lost his job? Because he was a first baseball that couldn’t hit 20 HRs a year without a juiced ball, and spent more time on the DL than in the batter’s box. Get in line behind Yankee would-be-great Nick Johnson and about a thousand more talented players, Wallace. And if you, Mr. Joyner, are losing your chance at the bigs to world beaters like Chris Donnells and Mark Carreon, then get your technical school degree already, because you had no shot to begin with. The fact that those chumps needed PEDs to do as poorly as they did to stick around as briefly as they did says more about the quality of their competition than the quality of their character.

So, yeah, Bud Selig should be proud. He spent millions of dollars on a report that didn’t prove anything that wasn’t already known, and also keeps the door open for more bias and speculation to fuel more idiot witch-hunts. You took a growing and thriving sport at the height of its earning powers, and turned it into a crappy episode of The X-Files. And yes, I’m talking about the ones without Scully & Mulder. It takes a man of great and triumphant stupidity, Bud, to continually shit on a business that’s succeeding in spite of your efforts. You could dig up Bart Giamatti’s corpse, and even that dessicated sack of pretentious crap would know enough to just farm out the PED tests & focus on CURRENT offenders, instead of looking into supposed past abuses. Congratulations on giving the sub-moronic sports media more sub-moronic soundbytes to mull over. If you’ll excuse me, I’ll be over here, looking the other way when the HGH arrives in the clubhouse, & ordering extra cases of champagne for that next Yankee championship celebration. Stick that in your ass, baseball.

New York Yankees Senior Vice-President Hank Steinbrenner has an Agnostic Front tattoo on his left shoulder.