The Melkman Gets Melked

Melky duped us for two years. But no one's fooled now.

Melky Cabrera was having the season of his life. He was batting .346, drove in 60 RBIs. He was an All-Star, and even better an All-Star MVP. He was building off an impressive a career year in lowly Kansas City last season when he batted .305 and drove in 87 runs. But sometimes, good things are just too good to be true.

The whole world came crashing down on Cabrera in the same day that Felix Hernandez threw the 23rd perfect game in the history of baseball, somewhat of a microcosm of what today's game is all about. Melky is one of a handful of players who have been tagged by Major League Baseball for steroid use and will have to serve that 50-game suspension that could be career ruining. And all while the hitters continue to be locked up by the steroid police, baseball's pitchers continue to throw perfect games and no-hitters like they're going out of style. King Felix's perfect game was third of its kind just this season and sixth no-hitter in 2012.

But forget how fitting today was for baseball, but think of the nightmares it conjures up. Here's a guy in Melky Cabrera who had a hard time cracking the .280 mark let alone compiling a .346 average in mid-August. The same guy Yankees fans just couldn't stand to watch because he didn't fit with their bash brother attitude; he hit only 36 homers in four years while donning pinstripes. If I told you two years ago that Melky Cabrera was going to the All-Star MVP in 2012, you'd tell me to get lost and probably get checked out. He wasn't a hitter, we knew that, but he was a great outfielder, making him somewhat of a commodity, keyword: somewhat. Then he was sent to Atlanta where he batted an abysmal .255 and struggled to find any rhythm.  Yet a contract with the cellar-dwelling Kansas City Royals somehow changed his career or did it?

Hindsight is 20-20. It's easy to see the correlation between the steroid use and his career numbers. Melky was at a crossroads five years into it and he had to make a decision. His high-quality fielding stock wasn't that attractive anymore and he decided to make a choice, a wrong choice obviously. Cabrera has fooled no one now. It just makes too much sense. No player magically finds his swing in the middle of his career without the help of performance enhancing drugs. This is baseball folks, a sport that was once engulfed in steroids and excessive testosterone, a league that almost completely lost the trust of its fans once it released the Mitchell Report that exposed devastating information for the league's integrity. No one even blinked an eye when they heard his was suspended for steroids. "Oh yeah, that makes sense. No way did Melky explode onto the scene without a little help." But most importantly Melky masqueraded a mediocre bat with the grand daddy of all baseball no-no's, embarrassing fans, teammates and organizations alike. But the San Francisco Giants have gotten the biggest load of the punishment, without even doing anything wrong.

The Giants are a pitching-first squad, bats are simply impossible to come by for them. They had found that guy and yet now there left searching for a replacement for a gaping hole. There is no trade deadline acquisition walking through that door, no waiver-wire guy is going to replace a .346 average and a great fielder all rolled into one. It's mid-August and it could be over for the Giants. My lord have we seen this story a thousand times before, but it's been a while since we've seen a steroids suspension almost completely derail a World Series contender.

It's a sad sight for baseball. I thought they had weeded it out. I thought that the only guys using steroids were minor leaguers just breaking through, fringe guys who just wanted to add .010 points to their average simply to stay on a major league roster. But no. The problem still remains. Our favorite players continue to try to stay above the rest of the league and embarrass us fans when they get caught. In some cases, as for the Giants, these guys can ruin a season.

I honestly don't have anything more intelligent to say about this situation. It. Just. Sucks.