Man Oh Manny: Ramirez' gaffe further complicates baseball's numbers game

(Photo by Harry How/Getty Images)

Grow up and deal, baseball.

The problem, as I see it, with major league baseball’s lost sense of self in the “PED age” is that there is a preponderance of historians, journalists, and pundits within the game who simply can’t seem to cope in a universe where the sanctity of records, mystique of all-time stars, and innocence of baseball’s storied past are threatened by disingenuous, devilish drug users whose very existence in the game and in the record books is reason enough to call in Congress, drown the public in a flood of steroid-related tidbits, and take a huge degree of attention off the real stories of the present season.

I’m sick of it. I’m sick of watching SportsCenter at night and having to watch 35 minutes of Manny coverage, and 25 minutes of crammed highlights, playoff action, and Top 10 highlights. It should be the other way around, to a huge degree.

You lead with the Manny story, and then recognize that by giving it ample coverage and superfluous analysis through legal, medical, and historical lenses, you actually make the story “sports.”

And it’s not. At least it didn’t used to be.

Throughout the last 50 years, sports has taken a violent turn from being a regional, communal dynamic of the larger social framework, to being the central unit of analysis wrapped up in an insane, Internet-driven SPORTS culture of micro-analysis and fanatical fandom.

It has, in short, become more than it was ever meant to be.

I write this as an avid sports fan, a lover of competition and the purity of many different types of sporting events, and, obviously, a passionate follower of baseball.

But don’t you sometimes have to take a step back and wonder why the character, integrity, and moral fiber of a Barry Bonds, a Manny Ramirez, or a Roger Clemens is really the central focus of the game?

Have we turned these athletes (that is what they are, professionals that get paid to be good at sport) into deacons of society, role models everyone should aspire to, icons that kids can depend on?

I understand the steroids coverage is speaking to and reflecting upon a much bigger story within the game, but give me a break.

Circling back to my original point about the preponderance of people surrounding the game today who seemingly can’t get over the numbers game of it all, quite simply they expect too much.

They’ve hoisted these athletes up on a pedestal and now expect them to carry the torch of baseball’s past into the future, but they’ve neglected the fact that the very nature of sports, the very context by which we watch the game of baseball, has changed drastically.

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