Why Jayson Stark Is Wrong About Alex Rodriguez and Steroids

It's not worse because it will cause massive numbers of people to stop watching or caring about baseball. Check the attendance. Check the revenue charts. People will come back. They've already come back. The sport, as a business, is doing great.

But the sport, as a unique paragon of American culture, is devastated. And that's forever.

Excuse me: this sport has never been a paragon of American culture.  Rather, it always has been and continues to be a reflective lens of our behavior as a nation—which sometimes is heroic and beautiful, and other times is selfish and ugly.

America was segregated along racial lines for the first half of the 20th century and so was baseball.  In both cases, it took bravery and persistence on the part of individuals black and white alike to change the trend.

Major League Baseball also has a long history of owners oppressing their employees—the reserve clause, which was in place until 1975, prevented ballplayers from seeking offers from other organizations when their contracts expired.  The United States meanwhile has struggled with issues regarding the ethical treatment of laborers since it's inception. 

When it comes to today's star players, their actions should not come as a huge surprise. We can see examples of selfish individuals choosing their own personal betterment at the expense of their fellow men nearly everywhere we look. 

While Barry Bonds and Alex Rodriguez were building their bodies into superhuman machines—the integrity of the game be damned—wall street power players and mortgage brokers across the nation lined their pockets as the world economy collapsed in front of our eyes. 

Baseball has never been immune to the ills of our society.  That's to a large extent what makes it such an important part of our culture.

But like the challenges that we've faced both on the streets of America and the fields of Wrigley and Fenway, we will learn from them and get past this dilemna.  At least, that's what some of us will try to do…

At times like this, I always tell the story of what it was like to follow Mark McGwire around in September 1998. I saw this man hit 17 of his 70 home runs that season. I saw records topple. I saw powerful numbers rise and fall.
   
But more than that, I measured the feat I was watching by who else showed up to catch the show. And by that I mean Bruce Springsteen. And Bruce Hornsby. And Barbara Walters. And MTV. And "Good Morning America." And many, many others just like them.

They didn't join us in beautiful downtown St. Louis because they'd always wanted to see the Arch. They joined us because this wasn't a sports story -- this was a massive American story.

This was a story that lifted itself out of the batter's box and plopped itself right down on Main Street. It was a story that appealed to Americans who didn't know a split-fingered fastball from a banana split.

But they knew what the number 60 meant. They knew what 61 meant. They knew who Babe Ruth was. And they knew this was a phenomenon that linked Mark McGwire to the Bambino, that linked now to then, that linked this America to that America.

That's what the home run record used to mean in our land.

That's what baseball used to mean.

But not anymore.

And that's the crime here. That's the tragedy. That's what we've lost.

What exactly have we lost?  The idea that the single season homerun record was won fair and square?  If that's the case, why not just officially say that Maris still holds the record? 

Do we really need to make this a drawn out tragedy that we can never recover from? Is that the American way? To sulk in our misery, rather than trying to look towards the future?  Is that what we did when Josh Gibson was forbidden from playing in the Major Leagues and thus deprived of his chance at the record books?

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