February 16, 2005

All Blown Out Of Proportion

Now that the dirty little secret is out that baseball players, including the beloved behemoth Mark McGwire probably used steroids, I wonder why anyone with a brain would be shocked.  Did anyone really believe that these players could naturally hit the ball 500 feet?  What used to be a feat viewed with awe is now as common as a cold. 

When Mickey Mantle slugged the ball over 500 feet in the fifties, it was widely hailed as perhaps the longest home run ever hit.  Now it’s a routine drive for today’s over inflated heroes. 

Baseball has long cast a blind eye to the sudden growth spurt of its star players.  As long as it brought in the fans and filled the pockets of the owners, nobody cared.  Because isn’t that the real national pastime, making money?  Whether the game was legitimate or not was of no consequence. 

Most of the fans’ of the game today want instant gratification and the home run is their holy grail.  When the scoreboard lights up like a pinball game, the majority of fandom is happy.  That’s because the majority of them don’t appreciate the strategies of the game.  To me, a 1-0 game can be every bit as exciting as a slugfest, if not more so.  You’re on the edge of your seat for every pitch because the next one can determine the outcome of the game.  That’s if you are a real fan of the game rather than most of the mopes that follow the sport today.  A lot of them grew up watching the pumped up cartoon characters that paraded as professional wrestlers.  You could see that their bodies were unnatural, but that didn’t matter because the sport was an exhibition rather than something legitimate.  And that is what baseball has become today: An exhibition whose credibility is suspect.

The word is now out that the FBI warned Major League Baseball about steroid use over ten years ago.  Baseball chose to ignore those warnings.  The players union had provisions in their contract against testing for performance enhancing drugs.  In fact, while steroids were illegal in this country, they were not against the rules of baseball.  You could get arrested for possessing them, but not suspended by baseball for using them.

The home run brought the fans back to the game after the strike in 1994.  Bud Selig, as the Commissioner of Baseball, could have done something about it despite the players union with his power as commissioner to do it in the best interest of baseball.  That’s the power his office held, but the spineless Selig chose to ignore the obvious and line his own pockets as the owner of the Milwaukee Brewers.

Does baseball have any credibility?  Do we believe anything anyone in power says?  They all have an agenda, and the legitimacy of the game is not one of them. 

Are McGwire and Bonds and Giambi and Sosa freaks of nature that grew to extraordinary proportions, or products of science?  I think the intelligent fan knows the answer.

Besides the records that have fallen of greats like Ruth and Aaron, what about the reality of the season?  When a player like Bonds can so dominate a game, and his team is constantly in the pennant race because of his domination, isn’t that cheating the fans of those other teams that he is competing against?  We know there are probably cheaters on every team, but if you cannot believe what you see, what are we watching? 

If this is Wrestling or Roller Derby, let us know.  Promote it as an exhibition, not a real sport.  To those fans old enough to remember baseball when it really was a game, this is a deathblow.  Since the advent of free agency, the game hasn’t been the same.  But this past era, the last ten years or so are a joke.  The balls, bats, and players are all juiced.  Most of the new parks are miniatures, the league has expanded beyond the talent level out there, and now everything is in question.

We can dismiss Canseco’s book as a bunch of lies, but are our eyes lying to us.  They’re not, unless like Major League Baseball, we’re keeping them closed.

SportzNutz Columnist Darrell Horwitz isn’t shy when it comes to “A Fan Speaking Out”… he holds nothing back and tells it like it is, from a fan’s perspective.  A Chicago native, Darrell is a lifelong Cubs and Bulls fan. Along with his “A Fan Speaks Out” column, Darrell is the fan writer for the Chicago Cubs, here on SportzNutz.  If you have any comments or questions, please feel free to email Darrell at darrell.horwitz@nutzworld.net