In the New York Metropolitan area, Baseball fans have a handful of options-- the Mets and the Yankees hold it down for the Major Leagues in the Bronx and Queens respectively, and the Brooklyn Cyclones play minor league ball, but even with multiple time-honored teams in the area, I've been feeling like New York City's baseball glory days are over. People have criticized the Yankees for throwing big money around and dominating the league unfairly for years, but since the A-Rod steroid scandal became public I don't think there's really any way left to defend them.

It's not even that this particular scandal is particularly shocking to me. When I look back at the history of baseball, I see one blunder after another. There was the player's strike in 1994, after which the MLB implemented inter-league play to boost their sagging popularity. A few years later came the great home run race between Mark McGuire and Sammy Sosa. Then it was revealed that McGuire was using steroids and all of the positive attention that the sport had been getting was thrown to the wind-- again.

The A-Rod scandal is just one more in a long line of incidents that hurt pro baseball. I'm not saying that steroids are the problem, I'm saying that every time something like this happens, the fans are disapointed. Maybe the pressure to smack balls out of the park has driven these players to performance-enhancers, but to me that just means that the whole spectacle of professional team sports has gotten out of control. Maybe instead of elevating the pros to role-model status and expecting them to smash records at the same time, we should concentrate on our own games, on a personal level and on a community level.

Image courtesy of Mr. Kjetil Ree