How White People Ruined Baseball

I used to love baseball.

The problem is that the people who run Major League Baseball do not. They love the money but they do not care about how they make that money. They also don't care about the long term health of their players, the men that the fans pay that money to watch play the game. As with other aspects of the modern white American culture, cheating isn't really cheating until you get caught.

When I was a kid, we would watch Willie Mays play with the San Francisco Giants on Saturday afternoon TV games. Guys like Johny Bench and Rollie Fingers were my heroes because they were good players who had a great sense of humor. The Oakland A's became my team in 1972, mostly because on black & white TV their uniforms looked like the uniform of my little league team. That was the first year that they won the World Series, and for the next few years they would win two more. During my teenage years I had lost interest in all sports, but when I was around 22 I got a job at a pro-sports apparel shop. We sold everything from t-shirts to game jerseys and caps. During the day we would put on the radio and tune into whatever game happened to be on at the time. So many a long summer afternoon I would get lost in the game play of the Giants or the A's, the voices of Lon Simmons and Bill King bantering, rattling off statistics and painting a picture of the on-field action. Soon I was once again hooked by baseball, and I would often watch games on TV at home. I even got to watch the A's play the Red Sox one day. Mark McGwire and Dave Henderson both hit home runs and Jose Canseco stole a base on his march to steal 40 bases and hit 40 home runs in a single season. During this time I would begin to hear about steroids and how certain members of the A's were "Juiced" up with them. At the time the NFL was taking steroids seriously and had begun to test for them in it's player ranks. Major League Baseball was a different story, the union somehow had successfully fought testing for steroids and the league office never really pressed the issue. I Like to think the best of people so I didn't take the allegations too seriously. Physical training had evolved over the years and pro athletes now worked out year round.

I began to lose my love for baseball after the second player's strike in the 1990s. If you love the game then you play, if it's about money then I won't waste my time with you. By the time that Jose Canseco wrote his book, and other professional players went public about their own steroid use I was far enough removed from the game that it didn't hit me that hard. As time has passed I have thought about it, and today I'm angry about steroid use in baseball. When the A's were on a 'Roid-fueled roll, I use to watch the incredible game play thinking how lucky I was to able to watch a great team take the field. I thought I could count myself amongst the fans of the 1941 NY Yankees ,and other great teams who shook the baseball world. As it turns out, everything I saw on the field was a lie. Those monster home runs, blinding base-stealing speeds and who knows what else were all chemically enhanced. The fans who saw "Murderer's Row" take the field back in the day can say that their heroes were the real thing, while mine will all have an asterisk next to their names in the record books. I have been robbed. Robbed by the owners, managers, players and the commissioner of baseball. Kansas City sportswriter, Jason Whitlock, wrote a series of articles about steroid use as it related to Barry Bonds but he points out the many underlying reasons for steroid use as well as illustrates beautifully how MLB turned a blind eye to the use of performance enhancing drugs.

Read his work here:

http://http://msn.foxsports.com/mlb/story/9212720/Furor-over-A-Rod,-Bonds-is-all-about-Babe

http://http://msn.foxsports.com/mlb/story/9215280/Go-straight-to-the-top-with-steroid-outrage

As in the house market/mortgage crisis, MLB knew that there was a problem. They made a decision not to do anything about it because it was good for business. The great home run race between Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa, and later Barry Bond's chase to break McGwire's record and then Hank Arron's home run record was great for baseball. Stadium were being filled and TV ratings were climbing. Why ruin a good thing, right? As in the financial sector, Major League Baseball turned it's back on basic ethics, and put on sick puppet show instead of a sporting event. The fact that both MLB and the player's union both gleefully ignored the long term health impacts these DRUGS will have on their players was never once considered. The fact that the union was complicit in the cover-up of steroid use is unforgivable, as it stands against everything that a unions is supposed to stand for. I wonder what the union's stance would have been had MLB demanded that all players use steroids? I would say that the union's part in this is shameful but that would mean that those who run the union have ethics or morals. I highly doubt this today. Then the Commissioner, where was he? Managers knew, agents knew, trainers knew, and every player knew about steroid abuse so how could the Commissioner not know?

From here on out, Major League Baseball will be a joke to most of it's fans. When ever a player has a career season the fans will always wonder what he was taking. The fans have been the worst part of this sickness. As long as their team was winning they did not give a damn. They would call into radio talk shows and insist that players have to do what they have to do, which is a uniquely white way to justify cheating and corruption. It is sad that this has infected the other ethnic groups that make up our great land, it's sad because there is nobody to turn to. There is nobody who is clean. Steroids are dog shit, and the white owners of MLB teams want me to believe that it is chocolate, as they track it into my home, and soil my carpet with it.