Surely, you’re tired of all the steroid talk surrounding baseball. It’s sickening, and really,… Surely, you’re tired of all the steroid talk surrounding baseball. It’s sickening, and really, the best thing to do is move on and make sure nothing like it ever happens again. Yet, nobody can let it go. And it’s hard to blame them, as something of this magnitude has never happened before. Baseball wants to handle this perfectly so scandal can be a thing of the past, just another era of the game. Except, baseball is writing the book on what to do as it goes along. There is no blueprint, or at least not one that baseball seems willing to use. Over the weekend, I watched a movie that had a similar problem to that of baseball and showed me the perfect way to fix America’s pastime. It was such a simple yet perfect solution to baseball’s problem, and amazingly, the movie was made in 1996. The movie is ‘Space Jam.’ Yes, the Michael Jordan vehicle where he plays with the Looney Tunes to help them escape becoming slaves at an alien-run amusement park on another planet. In the movie, the amusement park on Moron Mountain is failing, and the green boss guy needs attractions to make money. He opts to bring in the Looney Tunes. The boss’s henchmen, five roughly squirrel-sized creatures colored like a bag of Skittles, go to Earth to capture the Tunes and bring them to Moron Mountain. Bugs Bunny outsmarts them and says they first need to win a basketball game. The aliens steal the talent of Patrick Ewing, Charles Barkley, Larry Johnson, Muggsy Bogues and Shawn Bradley (clearly filling a quota). They insert the talent into themselves and grow a lot. Sound familiar? Yep, steroids, and before they were cool. The Looney Tunes steal Michael Jordan to help them beat the aliens, now cleverly known as the Monstars. It seems like a stretch, but it’s not the first time a sports movie subtly gave us pointers on real-life issues. ‘Celtic Pride’ showed us that some fans think they can help their teams win with silly things like seating position, when the only way to actually assist in victory is to kidnap the opposing team’s star. And ‘Rookie of the Year’ showed kids that if you aren’t talented enough to succeed in Little League, break your arm and skip ahead to the pros. Alas, this is about how ‘Space Jam’ is a film about steroids. How about the song the Monstars come out to, ‘Hit ‘Em High,’ by B-Real, Busta Rhymes, Coolio, Method Man and LL Cool J? The chorus goes, ‘We want it all. / Unstoppable, we run the floor. / You can’t take none of this hardcore. / In the game we take you to war. / You ain’t seen nothin’ like this before.’ Then it brags about hitting people high and low, which could be seen as instructions on where and how to inject steroids.’ Not to mention, many of those hip-hoppers are well-known drug enthusiasts ‘mdash; not of steroids, but of marijuana. It probably wouldn’t help athletes, but marijuana is a well-documented performance-enhancing drug for musicians, so these guys aren’t exactly out of the loop when it comes to honing their craft through illegal substances. Seriously, without pot, Cypress Hill is basically the Fat Boys, similarly to how without steroids, Alex Rodriguez is pretty much Placido Polanco. The Monstars dominate, completely overpowering the regular-sized Tunes who want to run set plays like James Naismith intended but can’t because of these cheaters. Likewise, baseball was once a game of small ball, where a perfectly executed hit-and-run was more likely to decide a game than the long ball. The Tune Squad is down big at the half, and all the players are preparing for a life of slavery on Moron Mountain, which incidentally is Jose Canseco’s nickname. Then Jordan and Bugs cook up an absolutely brilliant plan. Listen baseball, Bugs fills up a bottle of water, but labels it ‘Michael’s Secret Stuff.’ He takes a swig, puffs up his chest and claims he’s now ready to play. Jordan does the same. The rest of the Tunes follow. They go on to the win the game, with Jordan hitting a last-second layup from half court as he stretches his arm out about 30 feet for the easy basket. But did you see what he and Bugs did? Clearly, talent is all mental. So what baseball needs to do is legalize steroids, but get the steroid dealers on their side. Once you have the various trainers and cousins of baseball’s finest, pay them extraordinary amounts of money to make sure they don’t inject anyone with steroids. Instead, make it a polio vaccine or flu shot or something. That way, the game is actually clean, but all the players think they’re much more powerful than they are. It’s the perfect tradeoff. If the Looney Tunes could overcome its hour-long steroid era in basketball games to determine if a group of animated characters would end up as slaves, why can’t baseball? All it has to do is start handing out some needles. And if baseball isn’t going to legalize steroids, the least it could do is shut up and just move on.