Ballpark's Biggest Problem

America’s national pastime is in serious trouble.

Long gone are the summer days of 1949 where the playoff push engulfs a nation as two steroid free hall of fame players race for the Triple Crown and a pennant. In the heyday of baseball this stretch built up legends, birthed contenders, and crushed the dreams of fans across the country.

Nowadays the most intense push in baseball’s season is overshadowed by easygoing NFL players running around in shoulder pads and shorts.

By the end of August the boys of summer will be dwarfed by boys who were off from school for the summer. And by September the masses will have largely forgotten baseball even existed.

Setting aside the exponential growth of football for a moment, baseball has its own issues that are causing it to be drained of interest. While the Biogenesis scandal looms over baseball like the Mr. Stay Puft man loomed over New York, baseball faces other problems that could destroy it in time.

We’ll get to those in a moment, for now we must start with the bane of baseball’s existence.

The Biogenesis Scandal.

Just in case you’ve spent the summer spelunking and have just come back to civilization here is a short rundown of Biogenesis.

• About 20-25 players have been linked to the owner of a Miami clinic named Anthony Bosch.
• This clinic owner provided performance enhancing drugs to these players and agreed to turn everything he had over to MLB.
• MLB agreed to pay for Bosch’s legal bills and provide personal security in exchange for information about the players in question. (For the record MLB is getting a free pass from just about everyone on collusion for the greater good of nailing these guys. No sympathy for the users here, just stating a fact.)
• The biggest names on the list are as follows: Alex Rodriguez, Ryan Braun, Bartolo Colon, Nelson Cruz, and Jhonny Peralta.
• Nobody on this list has tested positive for PED’s this year to date.
• Ryan Braun has taken a deal from MLB and has been suspended for the rest of this season.
• Decisions on at least nine others are expected by next week at the latest.

Even after all of the tough talk in regards to cleaning up the game baseball has to get into bed with a questionable Miami clinic owner to try and stamp out this new steroid group.

Baseball will try to bring down the hammer of Thor on these players to discourage future PED use. The upcoming suspensions will lessen the quality of this pennant race (by getting rid of Oakland’s best pitcher and solid offensive cogs for the Rangers and Tigers) for the sake of improving the game in the long haul.

Ultimately that’s a worthy trade off in principle, yet this purge will not have the desired affect.

Dragging the old steroid guys before congress back in 2006 and watching them lie on national television made everyone who hit more than 30 home runs in a year a potential target of roid speculation.

Chris Davis will forever have to answer questions as to how a guy whose career high in homers (33) was topped before the all-star break.

Baseball can purge whoever they want and it is ultimately a good thing that players want the game to be clean. But their lying predecessors have cast omnipresent speculation over the players of today and tomorrow.

The upcoming Biogenesis purge is a public relations farce and baseball isn’t even close to cleaning up the game.