You may have noted that baseball and softball have gotten themselves thrown out of the Olympics beginning in 2012, which is good, but the International Olympic Committee, with its customary smug restraint, stopped at only two ejections.

Too bad.

Here are five more "sports" that are way more erasable and should have gotten a similar defenestration: water polo, shooting, synchronized swimming, fencing and badminton. Maybe if the Olympics started lopping off seven sports at a time, we could eventually get to a place where the Olympics are close enough to killing themselves to spark a reasonable discussion about whether that would be a bad thing.

Though nothing formal was forthcoming in the way of reasoning from the IOC on the baseball-softball killing, committee members said publicly that baseball in particular had a credibility problem due to steroid use.

That's very close to comical.

Without excusing baseball for its heretofore chronic drug myopia, getting kicked out of the Olympics for steroids is like getting kicked out of Richard Pryor's house for being a little too careless with the free-basing equipment. You could put together a documentary called America's Busiest Crack Houses and not come anywhere close to depicting the kind of global drug damage fostered by the pursuit of Olympic glory in the past 100 years.

"The best example of hypocrisy in sport is the Olympic Games," Dr. Charles Yesalis of Penn State told me once. "It's a big business that is drug-laden, a classic case of false advertising."

Yesalis, who wrote the book, indeed the books, on steroids and sports, has become the reflexive media's go-to guy on the drug issue, but most all serious chroniclers of the Games know that compared to the Olympics' posture on drug use, baseball's reaction to its metastasizing steroids problem was almost draconian and instantaneous.

According to David Wallechinsky's exhaustive Olympic reference volumes, now updated through the 2004 Athens Games, the winner of the 1904 Olympic marathon, one Thomas Hicks, was administered several doses of strychnine and brandy during the race. The IOC's medical commission -- springing into action -- began outlawing drugs just 63 years later, which was only seven years after Danish cyclist Knute Jensen died in an Olympic event from ingesting amphetamines along with nicotinyl tartrate.

Even at that, full-scale testing didn't begin until 1972, by which time doctors and coaches were so far ahead of the testing that for many years after that, East German swimmers, for example, and particularly young women, were pumped full of state-sponsored steroids and told not to tell their parents. When you factor in all the countries of the world and all the win-at-any-cost lunatics therein, and extrapolate those factors over all these years, the number of people including pre-pubescent kids that were ultimately screwed up for the propaganda value of Olympic glory might actually has dwarfed the significance of whether Barry Bonds hits 49 homers or 73, don't you think?

All that said, it's not as if baseball and softball are the first sports in the history of the summer games to be "discontinued," which is the very polite and official term.

Cricket got axed after the 1900 Olympics, and croquet was simultaneously asked to leave after drawing a paid attendance of 1 to a Paris venue. Eventually, similar fates befell golf, lacrosse, motor boating, pelota basque, polo, rackets, rugby and jeu de paume (which I believe is French for kick the can). Tug of War also got axed, but probably not because a foreword thinking Olympic official had nightmares about what kind of creatures the East Germans could create for the Olympic Tug of War team.

As for the disposable sports mentioned at the beginning of this harangue, I think their status ought to be tenuous at best for obvious reasons.

Water polo is certainly an athletic and exhausting discipline, but most of it occurs beneath the surface of the water and can't really be understood by most of the audience, not to mention my lingering suspicions that it would be better if horses were in the pool.

Shooting could come under some of the same criticism the IOC heaped on baseball, namely that the United States does not send its best players. Most of our urban assault weapon wielders are not Olympians.

Synchronized swimming may be aesthetically intriguing, but the competition on its face lacks the urgency of, say, Marco Polo.

Fencing, the visual equivalent of spastic dueling beekeepers, remains 100 percent impenetrable to all but the most devout students.

Badminton, which I covered at Barcelona in '92 and is dominated by wonderfully athletic Southeast Asians, has to go because you should not be able to buy the equipment for any Olympic sport at K-Mart for $5.99.