You're Busted, Holmes

In what has to be considered a gigantic victory for investigators in the ongoing nationwide steroids sting operation, former Major League reliever Darren Holmes has joined the list as the latest player implicated.

You remember Darren Holmes, right? Well, don’t you? He was that guy who saved 25 games for the Rockies back in 1993. Ring a bell now? 13-year career, 4.25 ERA, 35-33 record, 59 saves… remember?

Look, if you don’t know who we’re talking about now, that’s your problem. Darren Holmes was kind of a big deal. The guy carved out such a reputation for himself that a google search for his name actually turns up “The Website of Photographic Artist Darren Holmes” as the first hit (artistic nudity warning). There you can find “Abstract black and white photography. Information on the artist, portfolio, and news.” You can also find some mildly racy and/or semi-disturbing images of people of the female gender, one of which involves a pair of legs, and a dead fish, on what appears to be a hospital bed. But now we digress...

In any case, what we really want to know is, at what point do these investigators decide to stop revealing insignificant names until they actually turn up a big one? Because right now, we’re feeling rather underwhelmed by the likes of Gary Matthews Jr., John Rocker, Jerry Hairston, Jr., David Bell and now, Darren Holmes. (We intentionally haven’t mentioned Jose Canseco because we already knew about him, and we’d already written off Evander Holyfield as more or less having lost his mind, so we’re not gonna lose too much sleep over his connection to this whole thing.)

Taking all of this into consideration, our (admittedly unsolicited) advice to the investigators is this: Sit back and just chill out for a minute. What you’re doing now – screaming out against the likes of Jerry Hairston, Jr. and Darren Holmes – is dangerously close to crying wolf. Like an overbearing parental unit who tells a child to be careful crossing the street so many times that the kid eventually starts sprinting across boulevards blindfolded, you’re desensitizing the sports world to this issue – if it wasn't somewhat desensitized already.

So until you’ve got something really good, please keep your journeyman relievers to yourselves. At this point, they're just not doing it for us.

Now if you'll excuse us, we're off to go weep in the corner until the oeuvre of Photographic Artist Darren Holmes has been completely extricated from our brain.