While most bloggers will post their memorable moments of this past decade, I am going to focus my thoughts in another area.
What has happened in the game in the last 10 years ?
We entered this new millennium with a fair amount of optimism, buoyed by World Series being contested and won by wild card teams, such as Anaheim and Arizona, and we watched the Red Sox end their curse of the Bambino. So there was a lot buzz, and records were falling, and Barry was slugging 70 odd bomb in San Fran, and the ESPN highlight of the night was a barrage of home runs.
Then the BALCO scandal broke, the 2 SF reporters was criticised for yellow journalism, until we continued to peel this onion to find layers we could not ignore.
Now players were admitting no wrong doing, and pointing fingers at writers and pleading innocence, they were not cheaters.
Then the Grand Jury of the United States decided to poke their noses in, and players were called and testified, and most made fools of themselves, like Rafael Palmeiro, and Mark McGwire, and others. Then as nobody had believed Jose Canseco before, then suddenly started buying his book filled with scandalous reports of the Oakland, and Texas, and Blue Jay antics.
Canseco admitted openly to taking performance enhancing drugs, and MLB found it too hard to drag his stories under the rug, so they embraced the Feds inquisition, like it was their idea.
Then after a lot of stare downs between the inquisitors and the players, the Mitchell investigation was spawned, and when that bomb landed, 117 were said to have tested positive in random testing.
Slowly, like a leaky tap, did names begin to be made known, and some of the games biggest stars began realising that the jig was up. Some like Roger Clemens, who was outed by a former trainer, denied all wrong doing, and likely paid a higher price, and maybe one day, there will be a perjury trial and the sordid details will spill out. Jason Giambi apologised, but we were left wondering what for ? Some players cleansed themselves, and are not now the same players, like Ortiz in Boston, Tejada in Houston.
Manny Ramirez got a 50 game suspension just this decade was ending, so the decade ended with multiple black eyes.
McGwire was not voted into the Hall of Fame on his first attempt, prompting many to speculate that there could that baseball writers were throwing brush back pitches at Big Red, sending him a message. Not so fast Mark.....sweat it out a few years...juvenile stuff really. He either gets in because baseball had no formal drug policy, or he doesn't because he was not good enough.
The issues are now clouded.
The next decade is upon us, but what will it bring, a salary cap, no I mean a hard salary cap !, more players from different nations, as the game continues to globalise.
Instant replay ? My god, the game is already too long.
Regardless I will continue to watch this new decade for ups and downs and trends, and boy I hope my Baseball Forecaster is in tonights mail, it's a long time before pitchers and catcher report.
