Today is Opening Day for baseball -- meaning the Kansas City Royals and the Pittsburgh Pirates still have about a month before they are eliminated from playoff contention. The enjoyment of sitting in your room with a window open, the breeze in your face as you watch your favorite team on television, is an American tradition.
It is this tradition of spending your summer evenings watching games and spending your mornings searching the newspaper box scores that keeps baseball going despite some horrid scandals. Particularly in the last decade, baseball has had a lot of adversity to overcome. The 1994-95 strike that wiped out an entire World Series was a huge blow to baseball. Attendance still has not returned to where it was before that long period without work, although it has been increasing in the past few years.
Just when baseball was beginning to return to its rightful place as the national pastime -- a description better suited for the NFL over the last 10 years -- now a large steroids scandal is going through baseball as stronger new testing programs and news leaks lead to fans finding out that some of their home-run heroes have taken illegal drugs. Already, Jose Canseco, Jason Giambi and Gary Sheffield have admitted that they used drugs, and from the looks of what happened at the congressional hearing a couple of weeks ago, we may see that the 1998 home-run race's main players, Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa, will not be behind.
The steroids controversy has two camps: those who are incensed at baseball players for cheating and those who rightly make the point that steroids were not illegal in baseball during the 1990s, now referred to as the Steroids Era in baseball. Also, fans are growing more and more frustrated with the media's constant coverage of the scandal. Baseball Fever, a baseball chat forum (baseball-fever.com), has staged numerous discussions in which some fans actually agree with Barry Bonds, who made it known at a press conference a few weeks ago that the media should stop hassling him for what he has done because, as he put it, they all have "skeletons" in their closets as well.
Despite all of this, fans continue to flock to baseball. The tradition of baseball is something like one of those special reptiles with the gift of regeneration: You can cut pieces off of it, but, somehow, it will always find a way to grow back and win back its fans. Each year, no matter what happens in the off-season, fans wait with bated breath for the season to finally get underway, as it finally does today. There seems to be something pure and untouchable about baseball that makes it impossible for fans to stop watching it, no matter what is happening off the field. The steroids scandal seems to be little more than a distraction for the most devoted of baseball fans. Although an ESPN.com poll shows that 55 percent of baseball fans will probably not be able to move on from the steroids scandal once the season starts, attendance numbers have shown a steady increase since the strike ended, and record attendance numbers are expected by MLB in 2005 despite the off-season steroid rumblings.
Play ball!
Write to Andy at
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