If you didn’t see the point of my column on B-1 or think I was just too unimaginative to produce more than 15 words, maybe this will help clear things up.

The only things I have in common with Jos‚ Canseco are the first three letters of my name. That, and I used to be a steroid user.

Everyone who has watched baseball in the last 20 years and has gotten giddy over the pumped-up players and meteoric homeruns was a user. We used the home runs to get excited about baseball again. And we all had our blinders tightly fastened to our heads despite the billboard-sized clues that steroids were intruding on our pastime.

That is why I wrote the column on B-1 the way I did. I wanted to illustrate just how big and obvious the ‘roid rage was. If you notice, the shape of the headline resembles the shape of juiced-up slugger.

The headline is disproportionately big compared to the rest of the story – just like the heads of some players seem to have ballooned to an odd, unnatural size.

I wanted to make it categorically clear that my column was “on ‘roids” because the steroid epidemic really is a topic that I think deserves to be discussed and debated until it disappears.

And perhaps the most important point I wanted to convey was the effect of steroid abusers on baseball and the sports world in general. They fill up lots of space and seem impressive at first, but they really rob our stories of any substance and authenticity.

And the legacy they leave is no less artificial than the synthetic hormones they inject into their bodies.