Bonds was on steroids?!!?! No way!

Hockey is over and football is months away...time to make my monthly baseball rant before the Royals are mathamatically eliminated during the last week of April:

Thanks to the swell guys at MLB, my interest in baseball has fallen like a rock over the past 20 years ago. As a kid, my grandparents had season tickets to the Royals, so we'd usually take in about 20 games a year to watch a great team filled with great players take the field on that smokin hot ass astroturf. I lived and breathed baseball. I remember during the 1985 World Series...having to leave the room whenever the Royals were out in the field, far too nervous to watch to see if Charlie Leibrandt or Bret Saberhagen were going to give up a run. Baseball was life.

But somewhere along the way, baseball changed in me. The internet is filled with literally hundreds of thousands of stories, about people who "quit" baseball after the strike, or about people who complain about the big teams vs. the little teams. But for me, I always thought it was different.

To this day, I still play baseball every weekend in the summer. I love the game. I love the strategy. I love the high I get when I lean back and throw a fastball by somebody or break off somebody's knees. I love getting out of an 8th inning jam. I love picking off some smart ass at second base who just hit a double off of me and now has WAY too big of a lead. I love the smell of the grass. I love the "click-clack" of my spikes as I walk toward the water fountain in the dugouts. I love throwing 9 cut-fastballs to a guy and then busting him in with a four-seamer on the inner half. All of these things about the game are still dear to me, and always will be. It is my passion. It is who I am. It is the only thing in this earth I am 100% confident I am an expert at.

But what Major League Baseball has become has killed any and all passion I have left for following the sport on an organized level. The novels about what a dickhead Bud Selig is are obviously many...and you would have to be a complete idiot to think he's doing a decent job. But again, I always thought I loved the game so much that it would never happen to me. That happned to other people who followed Husker spring football practice or New York Jets season ticket holders. But alas...it happened. It didn't happen overnight. It didn't happen over a year or two...but gradually, I stopped caring.

As if there was a last straw...there isn't...but now Barry Bonds is about to break the most cherished record in sports, in a firestorm of contraversy so intense, it's going to make Tonya Harding look like a walk in the park. Worse yet, the dreaded "R" word is going to come out...as it already has. (Ironic that people like KC Star's Jason Whitlock say the firestorm over Barry Bonds chasing down Hank Aaron is about race, yet they're both black. Explain that to me) The problem is actually is that Barry Bonds is a prick who obviously broke rules to get better. It goes against everything sports stand for.

But I digress. Things like the upcoming Bonds firestorm are just fanning the reasons as to why I hate watching major league baseball anymore. Was it that hard to get a drug enforcment policy in place back when guys like Sammy Sosa were suddenly 40lbs bigger and going from 25HR's per year to 66? Oh...must be the "juiced" ball...I forgot.

But alas, the sport is as dead to me as it can be. Just when you think it can't get any worse....the idiots who run the former National Pastime find a new way to set the bar lower. Perhaps some person can step forward and provide leadership to make things right. Perhaps more than 6 of the same teams over and over can make the playoffs? Perhaps MLB can stop charging me $8.00 to download a G*d damn screensaver. A SCREENSAVER!?!?! I most likely dobut it, because even if that happens, the Royals are owned by a penny pinching Billionare who lives 400 miles away. The sport is doomed to suffer a slow demise...well, except of course in New England, where the Red Sox, Yankees and ESPN will form their own league to show 162 straight games of Red Sox vs. Yankees. Can't wait for that.

Did I mention college baseball sucks too? Dont' get me started early...the CWS is only 3 months away.

PING

AJ