Hire Charlie Sheen's Passion for Baseball, Fire His Steroid Use

Sheen: steroid pioneer?

People can and have said a lot of things about Charlie Sheen, but after his lengthy interview with Sports Illustrated it can now be said that Sheen genuinely loves baseball. Not surprisingly he went a bit overboard in his devotion to the game, admitting to using steroids when he filmed Major League. His passion is both admirable and a little scary.

Some of the interview highlights (all should be taken with a grain of salt, given the source):

"[Baseball] is not just a hobby, it's a religion. All I watch is MLB. I don't care what's going on in the friggin' world. This is what's going on in the world. Baseball is all that matters."

"When I saw the script [for Major League] it wasn't like catnip, it was like crack. I was going to a premiere, and I had a meeting with David Ward in the morning, so I had the script in the limo, and I was late because I couldn't put it down. Then I sat in the driveway for an hour to finish it."

"At the risk of being arrogant or grandiose, you have to admit that when Wild Thing comes in to get that final out (in Major League), it's one of the great sports entrances of all time. It was four in the morning, and I had been in the bullpen nodding off. This is pre-opiates-just good old-fashioned fatigue. It was so late that a lot of the extras had gone home. If you really slow the movie down and look, you can see cutouts of people in the stands."

Sheen, grandiose? Never! He went on to say that he typically had to throw 150 pitches in a day of filming, then came back the next day and pitched again. To deal with the stress on his arm he said he took steroids, which increased his pitch speed from 79 mph to around 85 mph but didn't make his arm feel a lot better. He also said the steroids messed with his emotions a bit, describing them as making him "bitchier than normal" but short of 'roid rage. Given what we know about Sheen now, the steroids may have had nothing to do with it.

Major League was released in 1989, which makes Sheen sort of an early adopter for steroid use in baseball (even if it was only a movie). We've been lead to believe that Jose Canseco pioneered steroid use in the majors starting in the late 80s, but who knows when it really began or who started it? Whenever Canseco writes his next book he may claim to have injected Sheen himself, but Sheen's admission raises some questions as to how far back steroid use goes in baseball. We'll never know for sure, but it's an interesting issue.