The State of Baseball

How did a sport that was such an engrained, visible and important as baseball was to America, almost overnight become irrelevant? That’s what it is becoming and it isn’t only because of steroids, although the steroid epidemic hasn’t helped it any. A few years ago when baseball was nearly forgotten, the revenues were down, the popularity was at an all time low after the strike and the cancelled World Series, baseball looked the other way when steroids almost single handedly brought it back from obscurity. So why all of a sudden is it such a big deal? First off, I’ll just put it out there before I go any further, I was a huge, I mean huge Mark McGwire fan. It hurts having to say anything negative about him. I grew up watching him and the Oakland A’s. They were my favorite team for a long time and he was my favorite player. I think everybody agrees now, that there was something strange going on in baseball during the late eighties and early nineties and steroids had something to do with it. I also think that everybody can agree that baseball, as well as most fans let it go and acted oblivious to the whole situation. As long as balls were being knocked out of the park and launched into the stratosphere, everybody was content to let it go.

The homerun race between Big Mac and Sammy Sosa brought so much excitement and media coverage to a sport that had been struggling since the players’ strike a few years earlier, which nobody wanted to jinx it. The players, managers and executives and owners turned a blind eye to the whole situation while the home runs kept flying out of ballparks all around the country and players past their prime were bigger and stronger than they had ever been and their heads were swelling up, nobody said anything. So ten years later, when everyone finally came to their sense, it is suddenly a big deal and everybody is blaming everybody else. And now, the biggest name in baseball gets ousted by an old test, who are we going to believe. The players won’t tell the truth and were left with years of tainted records. These are only the latest troubles for a game that has been passed by for other more exciting, faster paced games like football and basketball and NASCAR. Nobody has the patience to sit and watch a three or four hour game where the most action packed event could be the seventh inning stretch.