[Bill Simmons article] Confronting my worst nightmare

I've said it before, but it's gotten so bad that people (much like Simmons above for MLB) just write about it like that's an accepted part of the game. I mean What? In the NFL writers get pissed, and umps have routinely acknowledged bad calls. So has the league itself. The NFL is better set up for that - the rules are fairly cut and dry (because the game is inherently physical, the ticky-tack stuff is eliminated), and you can review without really interrupting flow. But even acknowledging that, the NBA indemnifies itself from criticism, and then makes a mockery of the whole thing by being outrageously inconsistent in their own league-rulings.

---EDIT - Oops srry for the reply to myself. Meant to edit.

 

Watching golf on TV is a riveting experience compared to baseball. I used to love baseball (when I was a kid) and was a rabid Astros fan. Now, the only time I actively think about the "sport" of baseball is when I'm frustrated that it's taking up time on my after-work Sportscenter. Seriously. It is a complete joke. In fact, if it weren't for steroids, there would be absolutely nothing to talk about regarding the game. I suppose Baseball should thank all the cheaters. It's keeping it on the front page...

Species and ideas evolve. We eventually gave up riding horses completely for the use of automobiles. Baseball is a horse-and-buggy-era past-time. It's time to move on...

 

yeah! i hate something, so everyone else should too!

 

Exactly.

 

Oh, Grooglerexx quit getting so bent out of shape.

 

Like baseball, don't like baseball....

What I don't get is how the majority of American and the National media are still stunned when another drug user is busted. I mean, come one. There's fatties like Berkman, but most of baseball's superstars from the past decade-plus are enhancers. Pujols used. Andruw Jones used. Vlad used. It was rampant. It's just silly to me that when Bonds was busted, the media started talking up A-Rod as the HR record savior. Oops. Sox fans loved ribbing Yanks over A-roid. Ooops.

If Baseball wants this to be behind them, the non-users and sackless commissioner have got to ram through a one-time revelation of EVERYONE that was on the list, and incorporate cycling-esque blood testing. Period. Cycling looked bad for a couple of years while they cleaned up the sport, but cheating is damn near impossible at this point. Lance already has been tested over two dozen times (hair, urine, blood).

Then you've got the NFL, where everyone's still completely got their head in the sand. The WWF is more natural than that league.

It's the truth, but we don't want to confront it. We don't want our sports to be revealed to be shown for what they are. We don't like finding out that our players might go out to dinner with "hated" rivals after the game, or that sometimes it really is only about the money in negotiations. We want to believe in Santa.

 

Evan might be onto something - make the list public that had A-Rod on it and contained 103 others. Wouldn't doubt it at all that Manny and Pujols was on the list nor would I doubt that Ortiz was on it. And I say that as a Red Sox fan and a Cardinals fan (my favorite team in the NL).

It is like Simmons said, baseball lost a lot of people with the strike of '94 and then McGwire and Sosa brought them back. Granted, they did it with help but then it just got out of control and got to the point where it was "Well, everyone else is doing it - why is this such a big deal?" Reminds me of a runaway snowball coming down from a mountain...

 

I love the game itself, and will support the Astros, but MLB as a whole will always be in third place to me as long as they go without a salary cap and have single players on the Yankees making as much as the Florida Marlins entire roster.

Obviously teams can have success without the $150 million payroll, but what about the fans? Is it fair for them to have to accept that they will never keep a good player longer than a few years? Imagine if it were the Astros, and Biggio and Bagwell were traded for prospects when their contracts were up.

The steriods thing is definitely a black eye, but it doesn't bother me as much as a lot of people. I suppose if we had won a world series like the '04 Red Sox and had so many questionable guys it might. Besides Tejada, the only relevant Astro that it would seriously suck to discover that used them would be Bagwell...and since his name hasn't come up it's looking better and better (at least that's what I tell myself). I have suspicions about Carlos Lee too, but before he was an Astro.

 

i love the game of baseball. i love playing it. i love being around it. i love sharing it with my kids. i teach them not to cheat. we go watch other people play it....if their cheaters, i tell my kids their cheaters and we go from there.

i love it too much to take it seriously enough to have some crisis of conscience over it. it's not jesus...it's just baseball.

great freaking article.

 

obligatory Bagwell-related trolling remark

 

record attendance and nfl-equivalent revenues are waving hello to you!!!

 

wait a second....the real crime in this thread is your proclamation of being a cardinals fan!!! holy freaking crap, manny. here, i'll turn around so you can pull the knife out of my back.

 

you have no idea what you're talking about. cycling looked bad for a couple of years and is clean now? lol, yeah, right.

cycling was always a sport full of drugs and it probably won't ever change. what they did is they caught the stupid riders and those who didn't have the money or resources to be up to date. they contolled the most common and easy to detect doping practices. that's basically all they did. but the clever riders (like lance armstrong for example) have newer and better methods since years ago.

lance armstrong never got caught (well, at least officially) until he ended his career. that right there tells you that it never was even close to impossible to cheat. if you ask any expert they'd tell you that there wasn't a single tour de france winner in the last 20 years that wasn't most definitely full of drugs.

i don't know much about baseball but when there's lots of money involved, there is always doping. baseball is probably full of it. so is football, basketball, wwe, swimming, track and field, tennis, soccer or cycling.

 

For the first time last summer, I watched the Olympics while not in the US. While I was pissed that I didn't get to see all of the USA Basketball games, it was fantastic to see the games from a different point of view and without all the fluff and bull**** that we see in the US. It was very refreshing.

That and I was introduced to handball. What a fantastic game.

 

Hehe, I do root for the Astros when they play the Cubs and anyone else other than Boston and St. Louis, I promise!

 

What a twist!

 

i feel exactly the same way about football and golf......

so much for that...


and to me.. baseball is far more interesting.. than basketball..

also, while i do enjoy the World Cup.. i'll neither watch or bear anything beyond it.. when it comes to soccer.. while i will watch and do enjoy every 162 game of Astros' regular season baseball..

 

That is unbelievably stupid. Seriously.

 

it's funny, because my wife says that about football....she says if you're at the game it's fine...but that watching it on TV, it just takes too long to develop and there are too many commercials. but she'll watch baseball on tv. to each his/her own.

 

Playoff baseball is awesome.

Regular season is boring as hell. 162 games is just way too many games.