Steroids have ruined the game of baseball in 2005.
MLB Post-Season Preview Report
2005 was supposed to be the year that I got back into baseball. With Sosa joining Tejada in Baltimore, it looked like the Orioles had finally gotten back on track. After seven seasons of misery, things were finally going to turn around. Don't get me wrong, I wasn't predicting playoffs for the O's. But I was predicting that we'd at least be there at the end. After coming out of the gate scorching, we leveled off, but were still there at the All-Star break. Then everything just fell to pieces.
Forget the losing. I can deal with that. It was the cheating that finally turned me off to this entire season. The Orioles could have gone 0-162 and I'd be a bigger fan than I am now, had Raffy not tainted our entire organization. This was a guy that I believed in as a young kid. This was a guy who had brought back my passion for the team. And in the end, just like everything we've witnessed from this sport over the past ten years, he ended up being a giant fraud.
If you can't trust a sport, it's not worth following. That's why there hasn't been an update on any of my baseball pages for half a season now. Until baseball gets cleaned up, I'm firmly planted in the casual fan section. Until I know that I'll never have another Rafael Palmiero on my team, it's not worth my time to really support them.
Maybe someday this sport will get cleaned up. Maybe someday I'll be back. But as for this sport, right now. I'm not buying into its claims of legitimacy - not when Jason Giambi is miraculously knocking them out of the park again because he's found some new drug that the tests can't detect yet. You can tell me he's clean all you want, but I've seen too many Brady Andersons in my time to not question it. You shouldn't have to doubt a childhood hero. You shouldn't have to doubt whether something you've been waiting 86 years for was won by cheating. You shouldn't have to, and I won't.
Baseball has fallen. I just wonder if it will ever get up.
