Baseball

I am a baseball fan. Not a George Will "the entire progress of Western civilization can be explained by singles, doubles, and triples" kind of fan, but I like the game and am looking forward to the upcoming season.

Am I the only one who thinks steroids have made recent home run records meaningless? The fact that modern players can break - no, destroy - long-held records makes a mockery of those very records. If a golfer suddenly started driving the ball 500 yards or a quarterback started throwing 95-yard passes someone would be suspicious. Yet when Mark McGwire hit nine more home runs (70) in 1998 than Roger Maris (61) did in 1961, no one said a thing. It took Maris 34 years to hit one more homer than Babe Ruth did in 1927, then it took McGwire 37 years to break Maris' record. You would think such a substantial increase in a record like that would stand for decades. Yet it only took Barry bonds 3 years to break McGuire’s record with 73.

When Maris broke Ruth's record it wasn't allow to stand on it's own because, it was said, Ruth’s season was 154 games and Maris' was 162, even though Maris only had 7 more plate appearances than Ruth did. Not much of a difference, yet Maris' achievement was belittled and added to the record book with an asterisk.

It seems to me that records set under the influence of performance enhancing drugs should also be in the record book with some additional punctuation. Not an asterisk, though. That's been taken.

How about a question mark?

Oh, and by the way, there would definitely be more triples in Major League Baseball if the Youth of America hadn't been corrupted by the welfare state.