The Post about the 2005 MLB Season April 3rd

                             

Baseball season starts today, and I just don’t seem to care.

I should explain how much of a fan I am so you grasp the depth of this revelation, but let’s leave it at this:

I came to love baseball late, at eighteen, and approach the game with the zeal normally reserved for a convert to the Lord.

Except this year.

Some of it is related to the Brewers disgusting collapse last season.

After more than a decade of losing seasons the hometown boys played solid, occasionally impressive ball for most of the year. For the first time in memory I thought they’d finish with a winning record, .500 at worst.

Instead, they tanked.

Spectacularly.

They not only couldn’t win, they lost in ways that made a grown man cry.

If they‘d began the season playing like bums - which had become sort of a local tradition, like Bratwurst and beer - it’d all be gravy, baby. But last year ruined it for me.

Forget the expanded payroll, the new owner, and the addition of Carlos Lee. They could be twelve games above .500 with eleven games to play and I’d wager on another losing season.

Damn them.

Then there’s the Red Sox.

I’m sure most of America is still gaga over their win. How anyone can be in love with a team that lost and lost . . . and lost for more than eighty years boggles my mind.

It’s like rooting for France, for cripes sake.

And the manner of their win: not only did they come back from a 3-0 deficit to beat my beloved Yanks, they also swept a juggernaut of a team in the Series. All on the back of a guy who shouldn‘t have been able to walk, much less pitch.

Ugh.

Then of course, there’s the whole steroids scandal.

I’ve written about that subject before, so I’ll spare you the details of my angst.

But this year there’s an added bonus: the king of ‘roids, Barry Bonds, is poised to pass Babe Ruth on the career home run list.

I know,nothing’s been proved.

Sure he admitted ‘accidentally’ using a steroid (betcha wish you’d used it on your knees, eh Barry?), and yeah, his mistress and others have pegged him as a user going all the way back to ‘99, but that doesn’t prove anything.

Two things bother me: one, he was already a great player before he decided to become a freak. He just wasn’t a power hitter.

Bonds was a player that single-handedly changed the outcome of games when he was clean. Add steroids to the mix and you have one man determining the winner in maybe a dozen games a year.

The Giants made it to the World Series in 2002 by the hair on their chin.

Without steroids, would the Giants have made it that far? Who really deserved to play that October? What great stories never came to pass because the heroes of the day were left to watch the Series on TV?

Second, the home run records are the Holy Grail of baseball. Folks will know that Bonds records are illusionary - now.

But a hundred years from now kids will look at the record and see Bonds name without knowing its context.

It’s not up there with God and Country, but it matters to me.

Part of me just wants to ignore the whole season, but that’s impossible.

I’ll be drawn into the drama, the pennant races, and the inevitable collapse of the Brewers.

And I’ll enjoy the whole dang thing.

I just won’t admit it.

 

Btw, former Brewer Alex Sanchez was just named the first player to be hit by MLB's new steroid policy ... as predicted, to show its teeth someone would go down - just not a star.

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