Thank god for Spring Training

Pitchers and catchers reported to Spring Training this week, and they couldn’t have arrived sooner. It’s about time the attention shifts back to baseball, and not the buzz around it.

This off-season hasn’t exactly been the best for baseball. Instead of revolving around trades and free agency transactions during winter meetings, the baseball landscape was forever changed by 500 pages of finger pointing and accusations in what could be viewed as the biggest witch-hunt since the Cold War.

Who knows if the Mitchell report has done more damage then good, but one thing it did do is change the landscape of baseball forever, and the lives of many current and former players, most notably, the lives and friendships of two of the Pinstripe Club’s most recognizable faces.

Unless you have been living under a rock, The Yankees’ Roger Clemens and Andy Pettitte are currently involved in a battle royal with congress and Clemens’ former personal trainer, Brian McNamee. McNamee, a former cop, alleges he injected, on several occasions, Clemens, Pettitte and former Yankee infielder Chuck Knoblauch with performance enhancing drugs. Pettitte admitted it, Knoblauch admitted it, but one of the game’s most decorated pitchers is holding his ground and saying no, he’s clean. Obviously, either McNamee or Clemens is lying, and lied under oath.

At this point, I really don’t care who lied. I want to know exactly what this hearing is accomplishing. So far, it’s only proved that McNamee was a stereotypical a crooked cop by withholding information to investigators that is now coming out, and Clemens doesn’t exactly have a grip on the English language, using words like “misremembered.” Looking back, it was the Mitchell Report that began all of this, and it was the Mitchell Report that was supposed to end all of this. It has ended nothing, and, in fact, reinforced the steroids era even more so than before.

This hearing has reached an audience much broader than the casual sports fan. People that have never watched ESPN in their lives were watching the same hearing on CNN, and vice versa. It has now reached everyone, but that has gotten us no farther than where we started, and baseball now not only has to deal with the steroids problem amongst the players, and an image crisis as well.

The political theory of Postcolonialism involves ridding society of preconceived stereotypes that have been around since colonization. But political scientists say those stereotypes aren’t about to leave society because all we do to try and rid them is talk about them more. Talking about them only reinforces them.

It has become the exact same deal with the Steroids Era: Talking about it only has reinforced the problem.

So thank god it’s Spring Training, meaning opening day is just around the corner. Now, hopefully, we can get back to talking about baseball, and the substance of the game — not the substances of the past.