… that is too complex for any of us to really understand. Each of us has an organized way of thinking about the world — a paradigm, if you will — and we need those, of course; you can’t get through the day unless you have some organized way of thinking about the world.

But the problem is that the real world is vastly more complicated than the image of it that we carry around in our heads. Many things are real and important that are not explained by our theories — no matter who we are, no matter how intelligent we are.

— Bill James, baseball statistician and consultant to the Boston Red Sox front office, explaining how the team overcame a 3-0 series deficit to beat the evil, evil Yankees and win the World Series.

It seems every day we wake up to another story on the steroids-in-baseball front, but it seems to me that most of the ink spilled on paper and pixels dotting screens on this story have been wasted. There’s not much we can do but speculate about who used what and when and how much of a difference it all made.

To my way of thinking, if Canseco’s allegations are true, it just adds credence to the notion that a certain short period of baseball history, perhaps 1993-2001 or so, might be fairly considered the juiced era — juiced balls, juiced-up tiny ballparks, and juiced ballplayers.

While that assessment might seem to tarnish the statistical validity of some the home runs piled up during that era, we need to consider that every era has its statistical oddities for one reason or another. The dead-ball and high pitching mound eras saw pitchers dominate, while the ’20s through the ’40s saw hitters get the upper hand. The stolen base was king in the ’70s and ’80s and has now fallen away. Of course the biggest statistical unknown is how well many of the great negro leaguers would have impacted the record books had major-league baseball broken the color barrier decades before Jackie Robinson.

Bud Selig is correct not to consider asteriskizing the official record books. If we begin that, where does it end? Mental asterisks should be enough for the discerning baseball fan. As Peter Gammons put it, the “post-steroids era begins now.” Baseball finally put together a meaningful testing regime. I’m much more interested in the actual baseball stories we’ll see in 2005 than worthless speculation and innuendo and implausible and pointless denials.

I will make one prediction, however. If healthy, Barry Bonds will still get walked 200 times this year and hit between 40 and 50 home runs. This more than anything ought to tell you that whatever benefit steroids may provide in terms of faster recover from injuries and workout strain, they can’t make a ballplayer great. The people in the game know better than that. And, hopefully, as a little time passes and Bonds breaks Ruth’s record and closes in on Hank Aaron, the fans and the news media will come to understand the same thing.

After nearly two weeks of nonstop, daily coverage, well-placed sources tell me that not a single down of the coming Super Bowl has yet been played. The breaking news, which we are still trying to confirm during this scary and uncertain time, is that the Super Bowl is still scheduled to begin at 5 p.m. CST, Sunday, Feb. 6.

Of course, trying to find the game time at the official Super Bowl Web site is like trying to find a needle in a haystack — if the needle were subatomic and the haystack the size of the galaxy. Not that there isn’t plenty of mind-blowing analysis to be found there, such as this piercing insight courtesy of the brilliant mind of Gil Brandt:

I think it’s safe to say that you just never know what’s going to happen in the Super Bowl anymore.

That’s right, folks, predicting the future ain’t what it used to be. I honestly feel sorry for the football reporters who have to pump out two weeks worth of content when literally nothing has happened. That’s what they get for covering football. Schmucks.