How A-Rod Ruined Baseball (But Not For Me)

Baseball has never really appealed to me. A sport where someone can hit a ball only thirty per cent of the time and be considered a star would never warm my heart, and no amount of RBI’s, ERA’s or NPI’s could ever make it remotely interesting to me. Yes, I once saw AT&T Park from the outside, and I was in San Francisco when Barry Bonds broke the all-time home run record, but these were periphery experiences to finding an NFL store or buying NBA jerseys at discounted prices. It is the only major American sport in which I do not follow a team, mainly because I find it difficult to get excited about this jazzed-up, slightly more intelligible form of cricket.

The problem with baseball, of course, is that, apart from me finding it a dull sport, it is a game which I now continuously associate with drug cheats. Game Of Shadows would do that to a man. It is shocking that a man’s achievement in breaking a long-standing record could be so overly eclipsed by doping allegations and steroid-related doubts, but this, alas, is something which the sport has brought on itself. To be honest, many of the numbers put up in MLB diamonds over the last few decades are irrelevant to me, coated as they are with the stink of scandal. Bonds is, naturally, the poster boy for this doping era, an unpopular player whose feats will forever be tainted. Thorough journalistic attempts to discredit Bonds led to further allegations of steroid abuse by some of the sport’s recent greats, including Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa and Jose Canseco. The whole affair also led to BALCO, Victor Conte, the Mitchell Report…..bla….bla…bla.

But there was one saving grace for baseball. The damage done to the game by the scandal could be minimized by pointing the finger to Alex Rodriguez, baseball’s next ambassador who would help the sport avoid the same fate as the Tour de France and Marion Jones’ medals. This heroic figure, playing for the MLB’s stellar Yankees franchise, would show everyone that not all baseball greats were doped up, and that records would fall legitimately without a shadow of doubt falling anywhere.

Too good to be true? Of course. A-Rod’s recent revelations that he used banned substances between 2001 and 2003 have hit the game right out of the park and soiled the image of America’s favourite pastime. Displaying an honesty which perhaps should have emerged much earlier, A-Rod shook of the mantle of the MLB’s Future Hope and left the game in tatters. Now there are no clean, anti-Bonds figures, but purely a legion of fans that are left to ponder whether any dignity remains in the game they love.

But none of this is Rodriguez’s fault, of course. He was only doing, after all, what up to 85% of players (according to Canseco) do. The blame lies squarely on the League’s willingness to turn a blind eye to steroids and its failure to tackle with the issue, at the expense of the health of its players. The tightening of substance-related policies since the scandal might not be too little (although it was initially), but it is certainly too late. Now that widespread use of illegal substances has been confirmed even by the MLB’s biggest star, the achievements and even victories of all players and teams in the so-called doping era are rendered invalid, as if they never happened. And that must be quite a blow for the game’s fans.

Luckily, though, I am not one of them.