Boy, I Sure Am Glad I Never Took Steroids During My Minor League Days
By: Matt Valentine

As a recently retired professional baseball player, you better believe I had more than my share of chances to take steroids to enhance my level of performance on the field, but I didn’t, and boy am I glad.

Yes sir, I knew a lot of juicers during my long, relatively undistinguished career in the minor leagues, and a lot of them went on to become major leaguers. Some even became big stars. But at what cost? Was it really worth it? I often contemplate these questions during long strolls through the halls and corridors of the mall where I work.

Sure, as I tell every smart ass teenager outside the Juice-It-Up or Hot Topic who asks me, no, becoming a security guard isn’t my life’s dream come true. It was to hear the roar of the crowd as I watched my first home run disappear over the fence of a big league ballpark, to see my face on a baseball card, to have itching powder sprinkled into my jockstrap by the likes of Derek Jeter or Ken Griffey Jr. But hey, at least I failed honestly.

Naturally it would have been nice to live the glamorous lifestyle being in The Show affords, traveling the country on the team plane playing the game you love by day and eating in restaurants that don't employ retards and staying in hotels where you can get some sleep without being kept up all night by the crackheads next door taking turns beating and fucking the shit out of each other until someone calls the police, and then the cops come and that makes for another huge commotion by night, but would I trade all that for a soiled conscience? I guess not.

And that's not even mentioning the damage that stuff does to your body. Of course I could've just taken a cycle or two to get me over the hump the year I hit twenty home runs for the triple-A Fresno Grizzlies, so I'd at least get my shot with the Giants, maybe do well enough to sign a contract lucrative enough to insure I didn't have to spend eight hours a day walking around the Valley Plaza Shopping Center in Bakersfield at the age of thirty-four watching a bunch of human cattle lurch aimlessly from store to store consuming overpriced jeans and cheap food court junkfood that could only make them somehow more fat before going off the stuff for good, but c'est la vie, I suppose.

Yeah, all that crap about being a bigshot major league baseball player is overrated anyway. Take all the beautiful women I could've had - the kind you have promiscuous road sex with until you find the one you actually fall in love with and marry, the kind who, if I were to ask out now would take one look at me and laugh in my face. Totally overrated. After all, most marriages only lead to eventual heartache and divorce anyway, and if you limit yourself to only thinking about them while you masturbate on the couch that doubles as your bed, they can't take half your stuff.

Oh, who am I kidding? I fucked up huge.