The nuisance of baseball purity

Although I know that all of you have been breathlessly awaiting my valuable insights on the mysteries of life, I would like to take a small detour as pitchers and catchers report to spring training; to throw in my two cents ( probably all the value it will ever achieve ) over baseball's inability to get over itself; or more properly, those who inhabit it's biosphere. Lo, with the gnashing of the teeth, and the renting of the garments, are we once again beside ourselves over the revelation that A-Rod used performance enhancing drugs. Many are the sports scribes and attendant voices raising the hew and cry over this latest punch to the gut of our beloved national pastime. So what.  It's becoming too much to this particular individual. I say this as someone who invests a far greater part of his personal time to playing ( yes, an old guy leaguer to the bitter end ), watching, and observing the game of ball ( a lovely anachronism that I think should return to the popular vernacular of the game ) than he ought to. I am not an anti-sport crackpot. Nor am I an obsessive who has no personal life save the online community of stats geeks and virtual teams. I love the game; have loved it all my life, and no doubt will until I'm moldering in my grave. I am also someone who has a decent understanding of the history of the game and recognize that it is not, by any stretch of the imagination, pure as the driven slush.

 

It is therefore time to say enough is enough. Baseball history is replete with the sagacity of individuals doing whatever it takes to gain an edge. From doctoring balls and the tools of the trade, to the apartheid that kept the great players of color out of the game in the early twentieth century, to the many and various potions and drugs that players have imbibed from the game's beginning. Professional baseball is not a sport; it is a business, and has been for a very long time. It is not the sport of children, or amateurs; the game that the rest of us play for our own amusement at our leisure. Everyone involved in professional baseball is complicit in the latest era of the game. As early as the 90's, when it became obvious, even to the most casual observer, that players were no longer the same physically as their caveman ancestors, the suspicion that players were juicing, as powerlifters and body builders had been for some time, became an open secret. 

Yet we all continued to go to the games. 

All that money from those of us who go to the games, watch them on TV ( and the advertisers looking to sway us ) , buy the merchandise, only fueled the desire for those in control of the game from the owners, their mouthpiece Bud Selig ( let's not forget that he is a former owner and as commissioner the spokesman and front man for the owners ), the agents, and players to get their cut of the pie. With millions on the line, the idea that there wouldn't be individuals motivated to use any means at their disposal to give themselves an edge; or to do as most were doing; an important point to note, is naive and goes against human nature. Very, very few of us would turn down the kind of money being offered the guys to play. That includes fans and members of the media who were in on the play who chose instead to laud rather than to expose.

Let it go.

 Hypocrisy is an ugly face no matter who chooses to wear it. Be honest and accept that the game has gone down this road with all of us cheering; whether we had a queasy feeling in our stomachs or not. If baseball chooses to try to stem the tide of PED's; let it try. Maybe someday they'll be as clean as football ( because as we all know it's normal for men to be that big and that strong and that fast naturally even if their football forebears were not ), or it won't be as important. If you are outraged; don't watch; don't participate; do something else with your time and energy. All these calls by the sirens of baseball is hypocrisy; plain and simple. Asterisks and fey calls to remove records only point to the absurdity of this precious little dance. It's our little piece of baseball history; no better or no more egregious that those of the past. Get over it. 

Time to play. To the next era of the game.

I have to start somewhere

As if it's necessary for there to be one more voice floating out in the ether; and in more ways than one it's not, I feel compelled to add my valuable two cents. Not that I will be regaling you with lurid tales of my own personal fetishes; there seems to be plenty of that about; nor will I be dishing about other people as I know very few and I see no reason to offend what few people I still know. I feel the responsibility to pontificate in grave voice on the meaning of all things whether I know what I'm talking about or not. And let's be honest, this isn't a medium of august rumination; look at it's affectation: blog. More like something found in a living room after a party gone bad. It may turn out to be just that. A billion notes played in no particular order. This then is my toot. Whether I truly know anything is mostly beside the point, which is to throw out my notions, thoughts, and predilections. Some things hold my interest more than others, and since my job requires no real thought on my part, my brain tends to go off on it's own; leading to these profundities. So why write anything at all?

 I'm interested in the base and the profound; simply, why are we here; what does it all mean; is there any real point to it; is it planned or happenstance; do we wait for some glorious or horrible afterlife, or do we make the most or least of our time because there's nothing beyond it? We, as humans, have the gift of seeing ourselves in outsized manifestations of our importance in the cosmos. We're not merely the byproduct of cosmological forces, over which we have no control; no, we are meaningful characters in God's infinite play; ready to strut and fret in our leading role. It is the scope and force of that actors distinction that gives us such dread. Are we really a leading force or a bit presence adding nothing more than diversity and color ( as if the universe needs more )? Perhaps a more simple way to state it is why are we here? Beyond the obvious; I'm at this location at this time doing the following for the following purpose. What exactly is the reason for life, for being, for existence? Are we part of a grand design? Are we just a cosmological ( I just love that word ) nanosecond; less than a blink in the eyes of the universe? What exactly describes what we're meant to do? What is life? Is it really anything other than a period of time existing on a planet in a galaxy in the universe? Are the answers in philosophy, theology; the works of humanity's great thinkers? Is it more than a way to kill time until the sun dies taking the Earth and all it's history with it?

Does there have to be something at the end? If so; why? Why can't it just end, or more specifically play out as all other heavenly bodies do when their energy is exhausted? Is that so terrible? Why do we seem so fearful of being nothing more than a small part of a much greater whole?

Those are the questions I intend to explore. I might also go on a periodic tangent as concerns politics and baseball and the pungent miasma that washes upon my shores.