Give Us Back Baseball

A great post by Peter Abraham from The Journal News. If you really want your Yankee news and want to be kept updated on what’s going on, that is really the place to be. Here is his post from earlier this evening about how baseball really should have been focusing on the positive news this off season instead of now being bogged down by all this steroid talk.

You have to wonder whether Bud Selig is still so pleased with himself for getting George Mitchell to investigate the use of performance enhancing drugs in baseball.

I’m trying to figure out how looking into the past will help the game now or in the future. Thanks to this investigation, baseball is all tied up by Congress, the IRS, the FBI, assorted lawyers, weepy trainers and preachy columnists wringing their hands.

The Hall of Fame has been dragged into the muck and the 2008 season is headed that way. Andy Pettitte is now scheduled to appear before Congress on Feb. 13, a day before he reports to Tampa.

For what? Selig would have been much better off having Mitchell simply investigate the testing program and come with ideas to improve it. The Mitchell Report should have ended there. Now Selig has created a world where grandstanding Congressmen will try and get teammates to rat on each other before a live television audience. I didn’t need to see Rusty Hardin in action, thanks anyway Mr. Commissioner.

We should be reading about Joba Chamberlain and Jacoby Ellsbury, two Native American kids who will be center stage in the game’s biggest rivalry. Or hearing tales of the old days from Goose Gossage. Or trying to guess when Ken Griffey Jr. will hit his 600th home run.

Instead we get lawyers, hearings, charges and counter-charges. For what? I get it, a lot of players cheated. I knew that before. Stop telling us, just fix it. Give us back baseball.