Baseball. Yes, you might have thought you would not have caught me talking about baseball, but when the Earth shakes enough I do care. I will be succinct, however, and say what no one else seems to be saying.
It looks to me like efforts to reform baseball in the wake of the Mitchell Report have failed before they began. In the midst of the furor, someone had the bright idea to give a record-breaking contract to Alex Rodriguez because he's not been tarnished. And stepping up the payouts to unprecedented levels is glamorous publicity, right?
Not so fast. When you hand someone a $250 million incentive to be better than everyone else (whom we now know includes a vast army of cheaters), while on the other end, pay a laboratory only $.5 million to find a test for the last big drug, you are both stacking the deck in favor of cheating while simultaneously sending a message to players that you don't want them to stop. Of course those are only the latest twinned announcements of about financial distribution. If you add up all players salaries and compare it the money paid in efforts to insure a fair game, the imbalance is far greater.
While there is plenty of blame to go around between athletes, agents, unions, coaches, trainers, administrators, and fans, and sports writers claim it will take plenty of time and effort on the part of all those elements for reform, I say it will take only one element. If the fans are outraged, the money walks away, and the culture changes almost overnight. Until that happens, no athlete, agent, union, coach, trainer, or administrator is going to care.
