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ESGN... With Freddie Gibbs

Screw Bud Selig, Screw Hypocrisy, and Screw You

God bless America. This is the land of getting over. The land of second or even third chances; the land of doing whatever you have to do by any means necessary in order to fulfill the American Dream. I thought about all this while pouring a tall and...

God bless America.

I'm not saying that to be facetious—I really do love this motherfucker. This is the land of getting over. The land of second or even third chances; the land of doing whatever you have to do by any means necessary in order to fulfill the American Dream.

With that said, has America used unfair advantages for its own gain? Fuck yeah. Ask the Native Americans, African slaves, any motherfucker from Nagasaki or Hiroshima if the Red, White and Blue play fair. It's in the American spirit to take advantage of an opportunity. Hell, if it wasn't for Charles Greenlee and his exceptional work in my tenth grade algebra class, a nigga might not have gotten his high school diploma. I did what I had to do to make those around me proud.

I thought about all this while pouring a tall and muddy styrofoam cup of promethazine and codeine, watching ESPN to see which baseball players from the steroid era would get inducted into the Hall of Fame. For better or worse, that number was zero. There was a metric fuck-ton of great players who were snubbed. Take Barry Bonds for example. For the last five or so years of his career, Bonds and his juiced-up ass was pretty much the only reason I watched baseball—a guy that's either going to get walked or hit a home run every time he steps to the plate is definitely worth your attention. And you best believe Bud Selig and the MLB conglomerate caked off the stratospheric stats yielded by the steroid era even as they were decrying it—I was glued to the screen when Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire were hitting all those home runs to the point where I almost forgot that their respective teams weren't shit that year, and I wasn't alone. Hell, I think I even went to a Cubs game (Go White Sox, though). You can forever place an asterisk by these guys’ stats and keep them out of the Hall of Fame (word to Pete Rose), but would you give back the billions of dollars that they generated for you in the past 20 years? Fuck no. And fuck Pedro Gomez, Tim Kurkijan and the rest of the guys in the Baseball Writers Association of America because they built a career off calling out these so-called "cheaters of the game." Give me a Hall of Fame vote so I can vote in who played the best and not who was a fucking saint.

Babe Ruth drank alcohol during the Prohibition Era and used all kinds of uppers and shit to get him through a game. Ty Cobb was a racist prick who sharpened the spikes on his cleats so he could fuck up the poor bastard who might have stood between him and a stolen base. I think the reason nobody's getting into the Hall this year is that baseball as an institution just feels cheated. It's more a statement on the black eye that steiroids brought to the sport than the actual act guys using drugs. We ain't trippin’ if Lance Armstrong used so many performance-enhancing drugs that he became part horse; we're just ashamed he got caught and another one of our heroes embarrassed us again like Marion Jones. So live strong, friends. America runs off dope, not Dunkin'.

Freddie Gibbs is a professional rapper. You've heard of him. He's on Twitter - @FreddieGibbs