MLB History is Being Wasted

Homeruns can’t save us this time

This is shaping up to be one of the most historic seasons in baseball history.

During an era in which America’s Pastime is declining before our eyes, not even these generational moments have been able to stabilize the league’s attendance numbers.

Not even these two historic homerun chases, which haven’t been seen in decades, are able to stop the bleeding. One would hope ratings may mirror those of the turn of the millennia, the anabolic-fueled renaissance that ruined, saved, and disgraced baseball once and for all.

Baseball purists speak of the steroid era in hushed tones. An embarrassing family secret that better not be brought up at the dinner table. This gaggle of sportswriters and broadcasters also happens to have a death grip on access to the Pearly Gates of baseball immortality, otherwise known as the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown.

That’s why we will never see the MLB’s all-time leading homerun hitter, Barry Bonds, or many of his contemporaries, inducted into the museum of baseball greats — asterisk or not.

Whether they should be inducted or not (they should) and whether the entire institution is undermined without the inclusion of its greatest players (it is), that’s an argument for another time.

What is indisputable is the fact that without the steroid era of the late ’90s, baseball may never have recovered. In ’94, the league faced a strike (the worker’s rights kind not the baseball kind). That strike left a bitter taste in the mouths of fans.

Suddenly, players were hitting dingers left and right. And no matter how hard they tried, fans couldn’t stay mad at a fireworks display of moon-shots.

If steroids are no longer an option to keep the ship afloat, changing the rules drastically in the favor of batters should have the same outcome. At least that’s the idea — though with attention spans at an all-time low and declining, baseball seems destined to crater in a niche somewhere above Major League Lacrosse and below F1 in the next few decades.

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