People — generally out of fear or desperation — will make subconscious decisions designed as a “cry for help” to others. You’ve seen your uncle show up drunk at the family reunion (drinking problem, obvs), you’ve seen one of your buddy’s wives get pregnant too early (innate hatred of ‘working,’ clearly) and now you’ve seen Sammy Sosa — via Darren Rovell at SportsBiz and Hunt Auctions– basically begging us to catch him on steroids.

You see, Sosa apparently (or allegedly, if you prefer) had his jerseys tapered in the arms to make him look more beefcakey and whatnot.

CNBC confirmed through a source that Sosa did indeed ask for the elastic arm tapering for at least the 2002 season. The source said that he could not remember another player that asked for this specification.

“I don’t know why it would be tapered like that other than it being a purely cosmetic change so that people could see his muscles,” said David Hunt, president of Hunt Auctions. “There doesn’t seem to be any other reason why he’d do it.”

OK, it’s obviously not a “cry for help.” That would be giving Sosa way too much leeway. Instead, what this amounts to is the same thing that we’ve been dealing with for the past ten years: baseball players flaunting their abuse of PED’s squarely in our faces.

Sosa wanted to be known as rip-jacked (or whatever the hell the steakfaces say these days; I got out of the weightlifting scene a few years back so I’m not totally down with the lingo … perhaps TBL can hook us up) to the fans and he wanted everyone to see just how freaking obscene his muscles were.

And it’s pretty obvious that regardless of how transparent his steroid use was, (and it was — hence the lack of shock when we were informed that he reportedly tested positive) he didn’t care. At all. He just wanted to flex his muscles, hit home runs and kiss his sky-pointing fingers while pointing to the sky.

So is this some massive revelation? Of course not. And that’s not to take away from a great find by Rovell, naturally, it’s just that, yeah, baseball players have been mocking us for years and this is just another example of how little they cared about the damage being done to our national pastime.