The Sad State of Major League Baseball
or Why Bud Selig Needs to Step Down as Commish
Alex Rodriguez is the latest name tainted by the steroid scandal. He was just one on a list of 103 names tied to positive steroid tests from the early part of the decade. Sure, the test was supposed to be confidential, but once the names were matched to the samples, it was only a matter of time before the information became public. It's the American way! Now that A-Rod has been brought to earth, I’m sure Red Sox and Tiger fans are just bracing themselves for the seemingly inevitable exposure of Big Papi and Miggy Cab. ManRam doesn’t have a team, but he might get nabbed, too.
Right now, I’d be more surprised to find out unequivocally that a baseball player didn’t do steroids, especially a masher like Ortiz, Cabrera, or Ramirez. Or even Albert Pujols or Ryan Howard. Once A-Rod was implicated, nobody seemed safe. See, this is how bad it’s gotten! Even the ‘good guys’ are suspects. As it stands right now, the all-time hits leader, the all-time home runs leader, the person who broke Roger Maris’s record, and the player with the most 60 home run seasons will all be left out of Cooperstown by voters. How did this happen? Two words: Bud Selig.
Let’s look closer, shall we? First, a little history. In 1994, Major League Baseball closed its doors on the season on August 12. No playoffs, no World Series. Not surprisingly, this led to a fan backlash, and baseball’s popularity plummeted. Attendance for a full season in 1995 was only 400,000 fans more than that of the strike-shortened 1994 season, despite that 900 more games were played. A full 20 million more fans attended games in 1993 than in 1995. Attendance in 1996 and 1997 lagged significantly behind pre-strike figures. Baseball was in dire straits.
Enter Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa, circa 1998. Big Mac and Slammin’ Sammy battled neck-and-neck in an epic home run race. The final totals were 70 home runs for McGwire and 66 for Sosa. Never mind that McGwire was 25 pounds heavier now than he was during his Oakland years, and that his forearms were bigger in 1998 than his biceps were in 1988. Or that the 1998 Sammy Sosa couldn’t hide behind two of his rookie self. These guys were huge. Bigger than anyone who was just “working out a lot” should have been. And bigger than if they were just taking andro, or whatever Mac claimed he was gobbling at the time. No, something else was going on here. A lot of the fans knew that. Some cared, some didn’t. Some expressed their outrage. Most didn’t. And for that, fans as a whole are partially to blame. Not completely, because the nature of the fan is to watch in awe as super-human athletes perform super-human feats. Nothing personified that idea more than the summer of 1998.
Yes, McGwire and Sosa deserve a share of the blame. They shouldn’t have compromised the integrity of the game by taking PEDs. The same goes for all the players named in the Mitchell Report, as well as the 103 mystery players on the latest report, the one that exposed A-Roid. However, this fact alone does not exonerate Bud Selig. Baseball needed the home run race of 1998 to inject some excitement into the game. Face it: for the common fan, a 10-9 slugfest is much more exciting than a 1-0 pitchers’ duel. Pitchers’ duels are for purists and hardcore fans. But baseball is a business, and the weighty cost of new stadiums and outlandish player salaries cannot be supported by the hardcore fans alone. MLB needs the fringe fans. And the fringe fans will only watch if the game is exciting. A purist like myself finds an epic pitchers’ duel exciting, but to the average fan, the only excitement that a pitcher could generate is a no-hitter. Fringe fans like the long ball.
Baseball needed a boost in popularity; it needed to bring those fringe fans back. So Bud looked the other way at steroid use, because the home runs produced by ‘roids were bringing fans back in droves. And it’s not like Sosa and McGwire were the only case studies, either. Brady Anderson hit 50 home runs in 1996. Fifty! He never reached even half that amount again in his career. Roger Clemens ballooned in size and became a much better pitcher in his late 30s than he was in his late 20s. And the man who was supposed to save baseball, the one who was going to render Barroid’s tarnished record irrelevant, now he’s a steroid statistic.
Looking past individual players, there’s the empirical evidence as well. Over the last 30 years, not including the strike-shortened 1981 and 1994 seasons, there have been an average of 4276 home runs hit each season. On its face, this shows nothing. It’s the 15-year splits that are so telling. From 1979-1993, there were just 3454 home runs hit per year, as contrasted with 1995-2008 (1994 was a strike-shortened year, and therefore not included in the calculations), which saw 5099 home runs fly over the fences every season. How do you account for a 47% increase in home run production? During the same time period that the alleged steroid activity was taking place? Was Bud Selig even watching baseball during this time?
That’s why I’m calling for Bud Selig to step down from baseball. He needs to just admit he was wrong, that he screwed up and horribly mismanaged America’s pastime, and simply walk away. No more excuses, no more pleas to be exonerated, no more crap. Bud Selig is no more deserving to continue as the commissioner of baseball than Barry Bonds, Mark McGwire, and Roger Clemens are to be elected to the Hall of Fame. Less deserving, in fact. Not electing players like Bonds or Clemens is akin to pulling the wool over America’s eyes and pretending the steroid era never happened. But that’s what Buddy-boy wants to do. Just get a big-ass Sharpie and start blacking out the records. Hey Bud, you might be able to get an industrial-strength asterisk machine at Staples. That might come in handy when you attempt to alter the past.
Everybody involved in baseball has to face up to one simple fact: the steroid era was real. It really happened. Steroids or not, McGwire and Sosa actually chased Roger Maris's record of 61, way back in 1998. McGwire actually hit 70 bombs in a single season. Barry Bonds broke Hank Aaron's legendary 755 career home run record, by actually hitting career home run number 756. He currently actually has 762 career home runs. These moments are real, because people were there. They saw it happen. They let it happen. And now they have to live with the consequences. The steroid era was everybody's fault. Even the common fan. As the saying goes, "never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups," the fans could have done something. But they didn't. We didn't. Bud Selig didn't.
They say history is written by the winners. If we let Bud Selig rewrite the past and hide the steroid era behind the curtain, then he’s won. He gets his money, he gets his credit for bringing baseball back, but most importantly, he gets to throw everyone under the bus for the steroid epidemic. Bud, please. Do us a favor. Throw yourself under that bus instead. It’s what baseball deserves.
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