Sorry, guys, I’m not much of a baseball fan,

I guess not even Michelle is perfect. ;0)

Notice one team whose record is clean? No one could ever accuse Ichiro Suzuki of using ‘roids. GO MARINERS!!!!! The one true baseball team left in America. :0)

Simply put, society just isn’t serious regarding the drug/enhancement toxin problem. There would be an across the sports board zero-tolerance kick-’em-out, no pardon, no recognition, no rewards policy if there was. That sports unions actually balk at placing drug stipulations on their activities is totally appalling to me, especially when I regularly see how many kids at PAL look up these sterling “role models.” I know there are people who don’t care whether they’re watching bionicized sports or not, but if we’re going to do that then abolish all awards and medals and trophies because they’d all be shams gained under bogus unnatural means. It will really be just a competition between drug creators, not real natural beings.

James Greenidge
Queens NY

Baseball is a thinking-person’s game. From knowing what pitch to throw, to what pitch to expect, to what strategy to deploy based on the situation and the point in the game, no game involves the intellect as much as baseball does.

While I realize I’m late getting into this discussion, I just can’t let it pass without saying that I honestly don’t care at all about the steroid scandal. If baseball wants to punish them, fine, but the fact these players and their careers are forever tarnished is fine with me. So there will be asterisks next to records and the last 20 years will be looked back on with scorn. Big deal! As others have commented, baseball will move on. The players ruined themselves, not the game. It is rare that one player can truly have a monumental impact over a 162 game season. Besides, what are we going to do? Sit here and whine and piss and moan? (Baseball fans are good at that, just look back to the All-Star Game when it was held in Milwaukee) It happend. Move on.

Looking forward to the Brewers-Nationals 4 games series next year in D.C. I’ll be there for all four. And I’ll be sitting in the most expensive seats, gladly paying their inflated salaries, eating overpriced hot dogs and drinking overpriced Pepsis, and loving every minute of it.

On December 14th, 2007 at 11:31 am, Alphonse said:
I can’t believe how seriously politicians are taking a silly, boring game.

Is this the George Will influence?

from the Mitchell report, on the independence of the investigation

“I served as a member of the Blue Ribbon panel on baseball economics, which issued a report on that subject in July 2000. The other members of that panel were Richard C. Levin, Paul A. Volcker, and George F. Will.”

This stuff is just crinkling celephane to make fire noises. I haven’t read the report — how many have? but for each of the cases, when and what steroids used. That has a big effect on the criminality involved — or has the business about no ex-post facto laws been made moot as well? There are natural steroids, there are differing dosage levels, there are different reasons. Didn’t we learn anything from the war on drugs or prohibition?

I’m a weightlifter of sorts myself, and I don’t touch the stuff. No moral superiority here. I just don’t want to wake up one morning with a sudden compulsion to start putting Tom Selleck posters on my bedroom walls.

Seriously, this is a low priority item. Not even in the top 1000 compared with all that we are facing as a nation.

The MLBPA is the best union in sports.

That’s like being the best whore in the whorehouse. Or the best liberal democrat in congress.

The real heroes in this story are the players who were not afraid to take steroids because of some old-fashioned notion of fair play….

The baseball players union is out of control

and

Then I found out they quit because their UNION decided to quit

The MLBPA is the best union in sports. To throw the union under the bus shows a real misunderstanding of this union was fighting for. The ‘81 strike was to maintain free agency.

I don’t know what your employment situation is so I’ll use mine. I’m a lowly paralegal. If another firm offers me considerably more money, I’m free to switch. If the owners got their way in 1981, I would only be able to switch if the other firm sent one of their paralegals to my old firm.

This is crazy. Good for the players for striking. It’s never been about money (there’s never been a cap). It’s about creating an open market through free agency. It’s how business works.

The football union is an absolute joke. I love football, but how terrible is it that the players contracts aren’t guaranteed. If the owners decide a player is overpaid, he can be cut no questions asked. All the remaining money on the contract disappears. That’s ridiculous!

Sure football insures competitive balance. That’s great and all. But they do it at the expense of the people who actually make football profitable. That is a labor disgrace.

From that point on their arrogance got greater and my interest get lower. Eventually, when they instituted that play off game after the play offs but before some other play off game before the pennant race which is not called the pennant race anymore, I was done. I asked some young guys talking baseball a few years ago who was winning the pennant race and they asked what a pennant was.

Still, with all that, going to Wrigley Field and watching a game reminds me of what baseball used to be when they were the boys of summer, when they were someone for a kid to look up to, when a game took less than 2 hours, the players didn’t whine because they knew how lucky they were to get to play baseball for a living and they treated their fans, especially the kids, like the most important people in the world. Something magic about that stadium that brings it all back and I never even saw a game there as a kid, just as a late teen and adult. There is hope for baseball, but I don’t think they will be willing to save it.