Baseball's cloudy opening day

As baseball’s opening day comes and goes there is still the cloud of steroids towering over every swing of the bat. I know a lot has been written about steroids in baseball, especially on blogs, so I won’t bore you with the in ands outs of what it exactly means for the sport.

However, what I will say is that it has had a direct effect on how I became a fan of the game.

I was a late comer to the sport. Most people who consider themselves baseball fans are following a family tradition. My family was not a baseball family. It was slow; it was boring. I caught on to the sport a little bit just after the strike in 1994. I was living in L.A. at the time and the Dodgers went on a streak of five rookies of the year in years. Mike Piazza was a star in the city, but then Fox bought the team, let Piazza go and signed Kevin Brown. I lost faith in the team almost as soon as I started following them.

Then, around my junior year of high school Eric Gagne broke on the scene. I had known about Gagne when he was struggling as a starter, but all of the sudden he was this lights out closer. To top it off, the Dodgers got another catcher I could support in Paul Lo Duca. As sad is it may sound, Gagne and Lo Duca are the main two reasons I started watching baseball again.

Fast forward a couple of years, Gagne’s elbow exploded several times; Lo Duca had been traded to the Marlins and then the Mets, and while the Dodgers were still my favorite team. I missed those two players.

Then, the Mitchell Report came out and both of those players were on that list. The two players that were responsible for re-igniting my interest in baseball were both known steroid users.

I think this experience mirrors a lot of fans. A lot of people got out of the game after the strike, and then, whether it was McGwire, Sosa or Bonds, people came back. But now, it’s all but clear that these people came back under false pretenses.

That’s the real issue with steroids in baseball. Not whether or not the players have corrupted the game, it’s the fact that they have corrupted the fans.