You make some good points, and I'm glad someone else takes the issue seriously, but fundamentally I disagree with you because what you’re saying doesn’t justify the claim that fans are to blame for the steroid problem to the extent that we belong in the same sentence with owners, players and the media. The gulf between the levels of responsibility of those individuals who could have made a real difference and the rest of us is immense. The fact that a fan boycott could have made a difference if enough people had participated doesn’t mean that you can assign blame to the individual fan for failing to do so, especially in comparison to the owners, players and big-media folks who could have done things that weren’t contingent on millions of people doing the same thing.

And even if we accept that spending money on MLB is “casting a vote for the status quo,” the status quo involves any number of different issues that may be equally important. Does buying baseball tickets also make fans responsible for any problems with the current labor agreement? Are we partly to blame for all of Bud Selig’s stupid decisions over the years? If a fan hates the DH rule and complains about it every chance he gets, are you really saying that if he spends any money on baseball then he’s partly to blame for the DH rule? And what about any positive things that a fan might think baseball does, such as charity work or boosting civic pride or who knows what—wouldn’t boycotting baseball mean voting against all these things? It’s not nearly as simple or straightforward as casting a vote in an election.

You’re right that it’s a problem for individuals to deny responsibility for the big picture, especially in our country today, but I think the bigger problem is the failure to put responsibility where it actually belongs—in the hands of the people with actual power and influence—by spreading it too thin. If everybody’s responsible, then effectively nobody’s responsible. I should do more to reduce the environmental damage I do, but my culpability for the failure to curb global warming is light years away from Pres. Bush’s.

Mitchell's urge to focus on the future instead of the past (which King endorses) doesn't sit so well with me, the more I think about it, and it's of a piece with the idea that fans (i.e. everybody) should shoulder some blame for the steroid mess. It's really just another way of saying that nobody should have to take responsibility for whatever went wrong, regardless of whatever important positions they held, because we couldn't bear to actually investigate and accuse and punish all these fine upstanding people. There's no price to be paid for fucking up, and the parallels to our current political situation are hard for me to overlook.

Isn't this the same Chris Matthews who, along with the rest of the MSM, assumed HRC had the nomination in the bag right up until Iowa? What a huge gift of credibility and momentum that was. You can't seriously complain about the MSM's treatment of her without taking this into account. They've treated most of the other candidates (esp. Edwards) a lot worse by ignoring them.

And someone should point out to Gloria Steinem that if HRC were a man running with the exact same record, he wouldn't be considered a serious presidential contender.

That Giants-Packers game "may have been the most exciting game of the year," King? For real? As a longtime Browns fan, I completely agreed with your column last week about the fun of winter-weather games, but then Sunday's game wasn't much fun to watch. It was close, but it wasn't exciting as much as it was bumbling and erratic, and I ended up only being interested in finding out who would win, not in seeing them play it out. All I could do was wish I were seeing those two teams play the Championship game when they can feel their fingers, so that I could see some really good football.

It would have been awesome if it had snowed, though.

Eric Walker is right that steroid use hasn't been proven to improve baseball performance, but the circumstantial evidence is pretty damn good. Granted we don't know exactly who took them or what happened physiologically, but we do know that a lot of players (non-pitchers) took them for the purpose of blasting the ball, and a league-wide increase in runs and home runs followed. That's not conclusive proof, of course, but it's a much bigger stretch to believe this to be a coincidence than to belive the that 'roids, to some degree, worked, even given other contributing factors.