My First Article – and a Brief Disclaimer…

I don’t claim to know everything about anything, especially a sport like baseball with such a wealth of history and strategy and player diversity. However, I do know what I think about it. I will add the warning label now that I am by no means an expert in all things baseball, and I will occasionally be human (oh God no!) and make mistakes and say something that may not make sense, be right, or be popular. But so long as you care to read, I’ll keep talking. And even if you don’t care to read, well I’ll just keep talking anyway!

Oh, and of course, expect my typical outbursts on how much I hate the prominent baseball writers’ dominantly East Coast bias. They WILL occur, and my own West Coast bias will be just that – strongly biased.

Right now, baseball seems to be in a bit of a funk. And no, I’m not talking about it being the off-season. I’m talking about all the conspiracies and unfair advantage seeking and the illegal usages that have plagued baseball – and really, most sports if you go back and actually LOOK for it – which have become a central focus the last few years, and especially this off-season since the release of the Mitchell Report. Now there are two ways I can go about this as an analyst. I can beat you to death with facts, opinions, and senseless musings on this topic, like most people will do on most sports news and commentary sites for the rest of the off-season and probably well into the regular season… OR I can actually talk about baseball. So this is all I will say about the Mitchell Report and steroids in baseball as it all stands as of this moment:

It is generally human nature to look for a sure-fire advantage over others. Some people have that natural advantage without having to go outside themselves; others… well, not so much. What happens? People look for an external means of getting ahead. This isn’t just drug use or baseball related. EVERYTHING works this way – insider trading, government conspiracies, studying the answers before a test… everyone has done something of this nature, I don’t care how innocent. Yes, things might not exactly be as illegal as say pumping yourself with toxins that totally alter the natural abilities of your physical state, but hey, you get the idea. So as far as making this whole steroid issue the big front runner of the off-season or the regular season still yet to come, I think we’re making a mistake in sports news. Yes, steroids are bad, and those that illegally went about using (note that HGH was not banned until 2004? Or 2005? Point being, people were using it before it was banned, so they can’t be held responsible for what was banned AFTER) should be punished, and probably will be. But what did we do in focusing all this attention on something negative? We detracted from the actual sport itself, and the people that play it fairly and incredibly well. Will baseball be forever tainted by steroids use? Only if we focus all our attention on negativity. But I say, we get off the train of pessimism here and go back to caring about the actual sport itself and not the corruption of some individuals who don’t define the totality of the sport itself anyway. We need to go back to paying attention to the players that do it right, and especially now in the off-season, the trades, acquisitions, and changes that we hope to see in teams that will make everything more exciting and competitive.

This is all I plan on saying about this issue in-depth. I feel like the sport itself needs to go back to being frontrunner, and that’s what I plan to do with my analysis. You want to talk steroids? Go ahead. As for me, I’m going back to talking about baseball.