Back to Baseball

Now that the NBA playoffs are over and even the stupid parade in LA is done, it's that dead-zone in the Sports calendar. All we have now is baseball until football and Brett Favre show up to entertain us. And of course fantasy football. Need I say more! But thats neither here nor there. What is here and now is baseball and MLB. I remember not long ago that I used to blog a lot about baseball. I just realized that I don't write a whole lot about baseball these days. I am a A's and Diamondbacks fans and both these teams have been mediocre the last few years - one playoffs each in the last 5 years (A's in 2006 and DBacks in 2007). But thats not the whole story. Baseball has more issues as far as I am concerned.

I am truly sick and tired of the steroid controversy. I am not one of those purists who is insanely outraged by roids. For a long time, I just didn't care a whole lot. It was an interesting side-bar to baseball and it didn't seem to affect my interest in the game one way or the other. But over time, it has clearly had a huge impact on my love for the game. Some of my friends have consciously moved away from baseball, but it has been more sub-conscious in my case and it's been a slow and steady erosion. While blogging about the NBA playoffs and LeBron and Kobe, I wrote about how the NBA is a star-driven league. We always say that, but really all of American sports is star-driven.

While we all like to see a good team with solid coaching and great chemistry, the reality is, we love seeing our superstars more than watching a team of decent and mediocre players winning as an unit. It kinda makes sense if you think about it. People want to see greatness and performances that we are not capable of. The further away the player is from our talent level, the more amazing it is to watch him or her. Thats exactly why we love watching the LeBrons and the Kobes and the Bonds in our sporting events. Thats more true for the NBA, but it's really true for all of sports. Stars like Bonds and Favre and A-Rod just make the games a lot more interesting to watch.

This is where the steroids come in. Aside from pretty much wiping out any and all integrity from the sport of baseball, it has also brought down every superstar over the last few years. During the initial roid years, if you remember, we always spoke about how this guy was the biggest name in the scandal and that guy was the biggest name and so on and so forth. Then Bonds showed up and he was THE biggest name. You look at the situation now, there are no names except big names involved. A-Rod, Manny, Roger Clemens, Tejada - you name them and they are involved. In fact, we don't even care if it's not a superstar any more. It probably won't even make the news if a middle reliever for the Kansas City Royals gets caught taking some horse tranquilizer or buffalo hormones or whatever the hell these dudes take these days.

This means there are no superstars in the game worth respecting or following anymore. Every time the ball leaves the yard and further the ball travels, the more you wonder if that guy is on something. Shorter home-runs are more credible than real long bombs in some sense. Roids have made the whole game weird! No name is sacred anymore. Nobody would be shocked to see any name associated with this scandal these days after seeing A-Rod and Manny go down back-to-back this year. I am not sure what MLB is going to do to cleanup it's act and it has shown no capacity to do anything until now. But it better do something soon. I think they are being very short-sighted by looking at the gate receipts and the TV ratings and assuming that life is normal. But the roids are like termites working on a huge redwood tree that is baseball. I think it is slowly but steadily eating away at it's essentials and it will bring down the tree sooner or later unless MLB really does something about PEDs - something drastic.

With all that said, another interesting day today around the league. Two games ended in extra-innings on a wild pitch. How strange is that? They say that you may see something new everyday in this game even after 100+ years of baseball and that can be so true at times. 2 home teams - the Cubs and the Giants walked off on a wild pitch. Good for them. The day also featured brothers pitching against each other in the freeway series. Surprisingly, the elder brother and the inferior pitcher Jeff Weaver won against the younger Jared Weaver and the Angels. The Dodgers are on a roll even without Manny. All the experts said they were done without him. Goes to show how much they know about the game. May be the experts should be given some performance enhancing drugs. I would vote for that.