By Mark Bodenrader
July 5 2003

Excuse me for harping on the negative like so many do in today's cynical society, but there's something wrong with baseball. Actually, there's a lot wrong with the sport, which is why I'm seriously thinking about abandoning it.

Sure, every league has its problems (i.e. NHL), but baseball has taken the hardest fall recently considering the heights it once reached. The NFL took it over a long time ago to become the real national pastime and the NBA, despite a horrid Finals, has also surpassed it over the last decade.

Yes, the Royals are making things fun in the AL Central this year and Albert Pujols is doing amazing things in St. Louis, but the magic just isn't there like it was once, and the league is making a weak attempt at recovering it.

Some point to the 1994 strike as the death of the sport, but baseball's biggest mistake probably occurred when it decided to expand in 1998, putting teams in Tampa and Arizona. Just five years earlier, Colorado and Florida had been added and even then the talent pool had been diluted to a point where it severely hurt the game's level of play.

But in baseball's quest to get more logos into the market place, the Devil Rays and Diamondbacks joined the league and a deadly domino effect has transpired.

Not only has the talent level been stretched paper-thin, but it's been tipped disproportionately to a handful of big market teams because of the league's discouraging economic realities. Nowadays it's rare to find a team that has more than three strong starting pitchers and as a result offensive numbers have become utterly ridiculous, cartoonish even. It has gotten to a point where 20 years from now kids will be saying, "Babe Ruth wasn't that great. He only had 714 home runs. Richie Sexson had 100 more than that."

And a sport like baseball can't afford for its history to be tarnished. Anyone who has experienced Wrigley Field, Fenway Park and Cooperstown understands this.

But expansion alone isn't to blame for the gaudy numbers. Suspicions of juiced-up balls, players and parks have made fans skeptical about the significance of accomplishments. Sammy Sosa's corked bat incident certainly didn't help the cause.

However, I'm not about to let the fans off that easy, because they are essentially reason for this long-ball brand of baseball. The most popular players in the game are those with prolific home-run strokes, so of course baseball is going to cater to it. Take for example the public relations season of 1998, when Sosa and Mark McGwire supposedly "saved" baseball.

Along with devaluing its statistical history, baseball is now set on messing up its tradition.

The worst instance of this is interleague play. The novelty value of AL vs. NL wore off a couple of years ago. It produces only a few intriguing clashes per year, creates unbalanced schedules for teams in thick of division races and ultimately takes away from the World Series.

There's also a carnival atmosphere at ballparks now that is unsettling. The organ has been replaced by Pink's "Get the Party Started" and it's almost impossible to eat your $8.00 hot dog without being bothered by the park's cheesy attempts at entertaining fans.

But baseball is making no effort to rediscover its roots, instead it's chasing after the dollar and trying to make the league one big SportsCenter highlight.

Once the sport scratches interleague play, implements drug testing, pushes back the fences, institutes a salary cap, bags third jerseys, ousts its puppet commissioner and gets rid of teams that have no hope of gaining a fan base (i.e. Montreal, Tampa Bay, Florida), then it might regain my interest.