Players keep the game great
Peter, you may want to come up with a new title. This one strikes me as somewhat obvious. What else would keep the game great? On the other hand, if you're not saying anything interesting in the column, I suppose you wouldn't want to mislead your readers and make them think that you do have something to say by writing a good title. Point taken.
What We journalists are asked every day is what the Exxon Valdes mess that was the Mitchell report will do to baseball.* Some journalists use their own eyes tests to judge differentiate between users and non-users, with no ESPN classic flashbacks to the 1970s NBA finals or '70s Super Bowl players.**
*The construction "what...that was..." is awkward, and comparing the Mitchell report to an oil spill makes very little logical sense, so I hope you don't mind that I just removed it.
**I have no idea what this last phrase means. Are you referring to the network "ESPN Classic" or to "classic flashbacks" that air on ESPN? If it's the former, you need to capitalize "Classic", since it's a proper name, sort of like Peter Gammons. You do know your rules of capitalization, right? Oh, I guess not, since you also didn't capitalize "NBA Finals". Also, what do the NFL and NBA championships from thirty years ago have to do with steroids in modern-day baseball? Are you bitterly implying that those players were on drugs? If so, you should probably make those accusations a little clearer, and possibly, I don't know, provide some evidence?
Or you can just come off looking like an old, bitter, defeated reporter, who, despite (or perhaps because of) his unique proximity to the players of the sport he covers, failed to expose the biggest scandal in sports in the 21st century. You want to go that route? Okay.
The answer to the question of the impact of the Mitchell report on baseball's future should be is contained in this week's Baseball America piece on the 25 best players who are 25 years of age or younger. Three of the top ten members of the Baseball America 25/25 list appear in working on my MVP and Cy Young Award selections predictions* for ESPN.com, I had including Miguel Cabrera, who was number one on BA's list and runner-up to Manny Ramirez** in my MVP list; Cabrera is No. 1 on the 25/25 list, with two of my top 10 MVP picks, Grady Sizemore and Joe Mauer, in their top 10 in both leagues .
*"Selections" makes it seem like these awards already happened, which is what I actually thought you meant the first couple of times I read this. Additionally, since you only address hitters in this paragraph, your Cy Young predictions, while surely fascinating, are completely irrelevant.
** Manny Ramirez as MVP? Are you sure? You know he's 36 years old and coming off a down year, right? Oh, wait, he's on the Red Sox. Never mind.
At this point, I should point out that I did the best that I could with the preceding paragraph, which was an utterly terrible attempt to convey a somewhat salient point (presumably that the current crop of young major leaguers is quite good). If you were any other writer, I would advise you to scrap the entire paragraph and start over, because there's no way anybody can figure out what the hell you're saying. However, since I have a sneaking suspicion that you don't actually write this stuff, because you're too busy fielding retarded questions from Joe Morgan on Sunday Night Baseball. Maybe you just have some lackey who writes for you and English happens to be his third language. Either way, hopefully this way somebody can decipher your meaning.
In the National League, ? I have my MVP pick is David Wright as my MVP., who is he's No. 2 behind Cabrera in the 25-and-under catagory category*, and in my preseason top 10 I would have include Jose Reyes, Russell Martin, Prince Fielder, Troy Tulowitzki, Hanley Ramirez, Ryan Zimmerman and Jeff Francouer. and** In addition to all of the young, talented hitters, some Cy Young award candidates appear in Baseball America's under-25 list, namely Justin Verlander, Felix Hernandez and Cole Hamels would all be on my Cy Young preseason ballots. All of the players listed above are 25 or under.
* "Catagory?" Look, I understand that you don't have the time to edit your posts and make sure that they make some amount of sense, or that you have an actual point, or that your theories are supported by some evidence. But throw me a bone here. RUN FUCKING SPELL CHECK.
**There are many transition words in the English language. If you switch mid-sentence from talking about NL hitters to MLB pitchers, you may want to make a clearer transition than the ambiguous "and". Just a suggestion.
Every one of these players were signed and entered the minor leaguers in * began his professional baseball career under a strict drug-testing program instituted by Bud Selig at the turn of the century. Is the testing foolproof? Of course not, anymore no more foolproof than the programs in the NFL or NBA.
*I'm really impressed with how many errors you attempted to slip by me here. Let's count them, shall we?
1. "Every one of these players WAS signed", not "were signed".
2. "Were signed and entered" is not parallel, since the first verb is passive and the second is active.
3. Those players did not enter "the minor leaguers".
You sneaky bastard.
But by scrolling through that well-thought-out Baseball America list, you realize that the game -- as it did through the Black Sox Scandal and the canceling of the 1994 World Series -- keeps re-inventing itself*. Watch Ryan Howard's commercial for Dick's Sporting Goods**, or just watch Delmon Young and Evan Longoria hit or Clayton Kershaw and Joba Chamberlain throw, and know that, once again, the players will save baseball***.
*I have no idea what this phrase means. Isn't the game pretty much the same, just (supposedly) without the drugs? The phrase "re-inventing itself" implies that radical changes were made. For example, "Jamie Moyer re-invented himself as a pitcher when he realized he could only throw 76 mph."
**What commercial are you talking about? And how would this help me understand the quality of the young players? Must be one hell of a commercial.
***I know Foist and I have said this many times before, but it's worth repeating: Baseball is doing fine! It doesn't need to be "saved"! It's setting attendance records year after year! Nobody except a few decrepit sportswriters really cares about the steroid usage of the previous generation, which is essentially what the Mitchell report focused on.
It would have been so easy for you to just write the above column, preferably with my corrections, and just omit the first and last sentences in which you, once again, bring up the steroids scandal unnecessarily. It could just be a nice, fun column about how great today's young players are, and even if it's not earth-shattering news, don't you think it would be a nice gesture to recognize the contributions of today's young players without relating them to the Mitchell report?
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