Our Now Scarred Pastime

Hopefully a new version of “Take Me out to the Ball Game” never resembles anything this; “Take me out to the ball game, take me out with the crowd. Buy me some syringes and HGH…”            

           

            Unfortunately though, at the rate of which baseball is being tarnished by steroids and performance enhancing drugs, not much integrity of the great game might be left.

            Let me take you back a bit, back to the late 1990’s when Major League Baseball was at it’s peak of popularity. Sure, it could have been because of teams like the Braves, Marlins, Indians, and Yankees (aka The Evil Empire) were exciting teams to watch with an abundance of talent. But, I would bet an absurd amount of money that it was because of one thing, home runs (“the long ball, homer, going yard”).

            Fans were obsessed with seeing a freakishly large man with boulders as shoulders and arms with the same circumference as a model’s waist launch baseballs as humanly far as possible. And who could blame them; I mean chicks do in fact dig the long ball.

            Players at that time like Mark “Big Mac” McGuire,” “Slammin’ Sammy Sosa,” and Ken Griffey Jr. fit that build and were accumulating tremendous offensive numbers season after season.

            60 home runs, 155 runs batted in, and a batting average around .360 were not uncommon at all to encounter back then. Today however, those kinds of stats are more of an oddity if someone magically produces numbers near those.

            So then what has changed in that time? Why have offensive statistics diminished so much? Why are players just not as big and muscular as back then? Well, the speculation is steroids and how it changed the game.

            Today, it is virtually impossible to think of a star player in the last decade that hasn’t had any links to performance enhancing drugs.

Names like: Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, Alex Rodriguez, and Manny Ramirez are superstars of the game that have been implicated with steroids. They continue to deny any use, even as evidence stacks up against them and as a result are viewed by the public as “cheater.”

 Others just have admitted using performance enhancers such as: Jason Giambi, Jose Canseco, Andy Pettite and Ken Caminiti. In these cases, players acknowledged that they made mistakes and end up looking a lot better than the one’s still being accused.

Regardless, if we find out the total number of users or see any more notable names to have to an association with steroids, baseball has a serious problem! Sadly, steroids look to be that horrible stigma that will stick around the game for a while to come.

It’s not fair for the players that are or were regarded as “great” players. A current prime example is Jose Bautista (who by the way stands 6 feet tall and weighs 200 pounds) of the Toronto Blue Jays, who has isolated himself from the rest of the league in homerun totals the last two years. Because of this outburst of homeruns randomly, people began to think he is the potential beneficiary of steroids, instead of good hard work being put in.

It’s just sad how much steroids has plagued baseball. They skewed statistics for players, determined Hall Of Fame Members, and created an everlasting scar. The integrity of our beloved pastime is at an all-time low. Who could have thought such a obscurely small needle would have such immense and costly repercussions?