Letters to the Editor
Amerigo
Published Letters: 955 Editor's Choice: 60
-
Oh, and another thing...
[Read the article: King Kaufman's Sports Daily]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Baseball is a SPORT not a freak show like professional wrestling.
Like other major sports, such as soccer and basketball, it is played all over the world, predominantly by young people.
The thing that defines a sport as opposed to a freak show is that the sport is played by the same rules at all levels of the game.
Sport is a form of ritualized combat played out for the entertainment of the players and spectators. Anyone should be able to participate. There should not be a requirement that a young man (or woman) destroy his health with drugs to be able to compete at the highest level.
I know a boy, a young man, of 17 who lives in the Dominican Republic. He is an extremely talented athlete and baseball player and hopes to become a professional. His family is very, very poor and their home was flooded out in the recent storm disaster. I very much doubt that he will ever make it as a top pro, but he has his hopes and dreams. I don't want it to be mandatory for kids like him to have to destroy their health by using steroids to try to make the big time in their sport. Their life is tough enough already.
Professional baseball has been pathetically wimpy over drugs for far too long. World class soccer player Rio Ferdinand was suspended for a year and a half just for missing a scheduled drug test. He said he had forgotten and went shopping for home furnishings for his mansion, (and one can understand him being excited about home furnishings), but he was still suspended for more than a year.
There are not too many missed drug tests in soccer.
-
It's bigger than that...
[Read the article: King Kaufman's Sports Daily]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]What some of you guys don't realize is that in this global market there is a titanic struggle going on between sports to capture the hearts and minds of the next generation of the world.
Forward looking owners are branching out of local sports. The Glaser family of Tampa own the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, but to most of the world they are known as the owners of Manchester United, and the scary thing is that with the Internet, satellite and so on people are paying attention. Some guys at my job who have never been outside of the US are much more likely to be talking about Wayne Rooney or Ronaldo than about any of the Bucs star players.
Sports like Rugby with its incredibly exciting, fast flowing, and extremely sporting world championsips televised worldwide recently, are also coming up to compete.
So it is no coincidence that the NFL is fighting back by taking Miami and New York right into rugby's (and soccer's) backyard in the search for expanded fan bases and the next generation of players.
This Bonds thing is horrible, horrible, horrible for baseball as a world wide product. It is like what Tiger Woods caught using an illegal ball would do to golf. It would undermine the whole concept on which the sport is marketed, the quest for records, for being better than anyone who has gone before.
It is all very well for cynical Salon readers to say "yeah, yeah, who cares?", but these Salon readers are not the world wide market. They are not the youth of tomorrow who may or may not make baseball their sport of choice.
-
Deterrence
[Read the article: King Kaufman's Sports Daily]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]This is the same argument that those on the right use to rationalize laws against marijuana, prostitution...
I would say it works. Most men in the United States avoid using prostitutes, because the embarrassment of being caught would be so humilating as to destroy their lives and probably lose their jobs.
Of course an awful lot of people use marijuana, but then there are an awful lot of people who don't and I am sure that some of them have been scared off by thinking about the consequences of being caught.