* It is to weep

Yeah, I think it’s depressing news on top of what’s been a flurry of depressing items, when it comes to Major League Baseball.

And if you’re a fan of Major League Baseball, I think it — it tarnishes an entire era, to some degree. And it’s unfortunate, because I think there are a lot of ballplayers who played it straight.

And you know, the thing I’m probably most concerned about the message that it sends to our kids.

President Barack Obama, Feb. 9, 2008

On the grand scale of things, having an athlete cop to taking steroids isn’t that big a deal. Tug McGraw’s “frozen snowball theory” puts things in perspective, especially in light of the current global economic crisis.

But, as Terrance Man said in his “people will come” monologue in Field of Dreams

The one constant through all the years,Ray, has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It’s been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt, and erased again. But baseball has marked the time. This field, this game. It’s a part of our past, Ray. It reminds us of all that once was good and it could be again.

So A-Rod admitted he took steroids, despite the fact that he told Katie Couric on 60 Minutes that he never did, that he was all-natural. Should mature fans be surprised any more?

According to many pundits, Rodriguez was sort of baseball’s last great hope, a player who did things on the up and up. Sure, he might be a bit of a self-possessed, insecure attention whore, but at least his numbers were clean.

Now will we have to consider every ballplayer suspect? Ken Griffey Jr.? Albert Pujols? David Wright? That’s the truly sad part: that it will be difficult, at least for a certain segment of the audience (some won’t care a fig), to enjoy their “pure” sport anymore.

Not that the players bear the entirety of the blame. Owners and the Commissioner’s office have long turned a blind eye to what had been going on for years, content to have fannies in the seats thanks to the offensive barrages of the late 1990s and beyond. And the player’s union, too, is complicit, protecting and enabling their constituency to an unwise degree.

There have been many comments by sports broadcasters; there will be many more. Here’s one from author John Feinstein in the Feb. 10 issues of Sporting News Today (click on image below).

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