Baseball. Blogging. Whenever.

Monday, May 18, 2009

This too shall pass

Whether your take [on steroids] is outrage or apathy, though, a deep breath would be valuable as the 2009 baseball season nears its third month. The game is not dying, by any stretch. And there is reason to believe -- when (or if?) the nation's economy rebounds -- that Major League Baseball can make its second century an improvement on its first.

Despite gross disparities in team payrolls, baseball has a competitive balance that should be the envy of the top-heavy NFL or NBA . . . Tampa Bay's Evan Longoria (23), San Francisco's Tim Lincecum (24), Milwaukee's Ryan Braun (25), and Cincinnati's Jay Bruce (22) will lead a generation of new talent that would have to be considerably dim to make the same mistakes its predecessors made in soiling baseball's image. (Cynics will argue this generation will merely find a new way to cut corners, but I'm not among them) . . . I've come to look at the outing of steroid users as baseball's version of weeding the garden. Now and then, an intruder needs to be pulled out by his roots, so the flowers and vegetables that make the garden so beautiful can flourish. And it's wise to remember the words made famous by everyone from Abe Lincoln to your own mother: This too shall pass.

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