It really defies logic, of course, that Boston Red Sox PED user David Ortiz would ever sniff the MLB Hall of Fame. But we all know how this works: If there’s money to be made, pretty much everyone to gain from that—including alleged journalists, ordained by the Bill of Rights to protect us—are going to look the other way, because now? This is America. Welcome to the nation that Ronald Reagan hath wrought.

And Bud Selig, of course. And let’s not forget ESPN, which in its pursuit of the almighty dollar became complicit decades ago in the frauds that constitute college football, the NBA, the NFL, and of course, baseball. Finally, the multitude of fans across the country … who cheered along as cheaters prospered, while (hopefully?) telling their kids not to do the same on the middle-school math test.

How do we justify the maxim that “cheaters never prosper” anymore now? We cannot. We have seen a lifetime financial criminal “win” the White House without a majority of the popular vote; we have seen Tom Brady feted by the masses despite cheating and getting caught repeatedly. Add Nick Saban to the list: Unable to win fairly in the B1G or the NFL, he has thrived only in the historically corrupt SEC.

The NBA’s list of transgressions are too numerous to count, but remember it’s a league that, with ESPN’s help, crowned a rapist as its hero in the first decade of this century. And we’ve covered the baseball corruption aplenty here, of course. Follow the money, right? Even into the journalism world’s hungry mouth, because in the end, too many fans bought into the fraud in order to … gloat? It’s pathetic.

This is what the sports world has come to; we know where it started, too: The Dream Team. That American need to win at any cost? Has cost the United States its principles and its soul. As one fictional TV journalist once stated, America is no longer the greatest country in the world. It peaked with the Moon landing in 1969, and it’s been going downhill since then thanks to our entitlement, greed, and narcissism.

That’s what Big Papi in Cooperstown represents today. We have to own it, all of us.