The shame of baseball

From Slate’s review of “Game of Shadows,” Stephen Metcalf puts the blame of baseball’s steroid scandal on the sport itself as it tried to regain fans after the 1994 strike:

Baseball is supposed to be everything but a game of shadows—more like a sun-dappled pastoral frolic. You don't have to believe that baseball says anything about our innocence or our agrarian past to find the steroid scandal deeply offensive. Where the other major American sports are populated by freaks—in basketball, the abnormally tall; in football, the abnormally hulking—baseball doesn't (or at least, didn't) reward the over-specialized body type. It was a game pre-eminently of repetition, patience, and skill, played by the normally proportioned. But after a crippling strike that canceled the World Series in 1994, baseball was in a bind. It could continue to stress its human scale—its intimacy, its lazy summer pacing, its ancestor worship of such untouchable greats as the Babe and Ted Williams—until George Will sat alone in the stands, weeping at the game's poetry. Or it could woo back legions of disaffected fans and change its nature, reproportioning itself to the inhuman scale of basketball and football.

Juiced baseballs and juiced players are part and parcel of this dying American game. Thank heaven for NASCAR: I have the Busch brothers and Junior in my fantasy league this weekend at Martinsville.