So: Melky Cabrera, erstwhile kind-of-fat disappointment, current batting champion, and All-Star Game MVP, is also the subject of the latest steroids scandal—for which he, to his credit, immediately took blame. Melky Cabrera is not a steroids-looking baseball player; he's a line-drive-hitting ex-center-fielder who spent most of his career gaining weight, and in his recent renaissance the most striking thing was that he'd lost all of it.
↵Which is just to make the oft-belabored point that the players who look like they're taking steroids are far from the only players taking steroids. But as someone who spent a solid year of his childhood rooting for Mark McGwire to hit All The Home Runs and was very gratified when he did—and who regrets none of that—I feel especially like trying to get people to care as little about steroids as I do.
↵That's probably not possible. But it's important, in the wake of this latest steroids scandal, to accept that you have to be suspicious of everyone, and that to be suspicious of everyone leaves you with two ways of dealing with that: You can let it sour your affection for every single baseball narrative and player there is, or you can just stop trying to constantly cast suspicion on every baseball player there is in an attempt to no longer be surprised by anything, and just enjoy baseball as it comes to you and be a little disappointed a few times a year when a good story turns out to have a suspension underneath it.
↵For me, at least, the second one is the only way to enjoy baseball. It's too bad that Melky Cabrera took steroids, but I'm not going to let that ruin my opinion of Melky Cabrera, let alone baseball.
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