Mitchell Report: Fans Do "Care" About Steroids

In watching all of the Mitchell Report coverage, I can't help but get more and more frustrated with the discussion about whether fans "care."

We're throwing around the word "care" rather, well, carelessly.

Whether or not anyone will admit it, fans do care about the steroids scandal.

The record attendance and profits baseball is rolling in aren't a sign of fans not caring. If anything, in fact, it's in part a product of how much fans DO care.

It's pretty well accepted that we humans love drama—and I'm not just talking about the 16-year-old girls among us.

We don't like to admit it, but we're drawn to drama. Our news, our entertainment, and our daily lives our filled with it.

If fans didn't care, we would have given up on baseball and quit watching it.  However, we do care—and though we hate steroids and want to get rid of them in baseball, the steroid stories are a guilty indulgence.

It's like the sports equivalent of Desperate Housewives.

When you go online to check the news, and you see the caption talking about a multiple shooting, you want to click on it and see what happened.  You do this because you do care, not because you do not care.

Unfortunately, the baseball steroid stories are similar.

We all wish they weren't there, but we always care enough to check them out, and we care enough to want to take care of the issue.

The talk in the sports world this week (and a significant story for many other news outlets) is the Mitchell Report. This is because we care.

I heard someone on the radio the other day compare steroids to the 1994 strike . Attendance was significantly down after the strike, but it's reaching record levels now. The pundit used this as an example of how fans don't care about the steroid issue, when, in fact, it's exactly the opposite.

During the strike there was no baseball, and despite our best efforts, the drama was not high, and was definitely not as frequent as with steroids.  Attendance was down afterwards because fans stopped caring, just like what the NHL is currently going through.

Maybe if nothing were done about steroids, and if we all just turned our heads to the issue, fans would eventually stop caring—but the constant attention and news it is bringing to baseball is never allowing for a dull moment.

Unfortunately, the end result of this is attention and profits for the people that could have stopped this problem earlier.

Maybe "care" is just the wrong word to be using in this situation—but if you insist on using it, there is no doubt that fans do care.

We just don't always like to admit it.