Libby Hill

Holy crap, do I hate baseball. That’s right, I think it stinks. There are very few things that I dislike more than watching a long drawn out baseball game on. And I watch golf on TV, for cripes sake!

It’s not that I haven’t tried to like baseball; I really have. I was raised on the Twins and the Cubs and always enjoyed my visits to the ballpark. My enjoyment was based far more on the peanuts and cracker jack, and far less on the actual sport itself.

Baseball was never an exciting sport to begin with, but lately it’s just completely fallen apart. The strike in 1994 devastated baseball’s reputation, making them seem greedy and uncaring. To further harden us to “America’s pastime” was 1997 – the year the Florida Marlins went about purchasing a World Series championship. Then we have the New York Yankees who make a mockery of the game by continually flaunting funds that small market teams only dream of. Then they win a lot of games.

Shocking.

If all of those horrifying things aren’t enough to put the final nail in baseball’s coffin, there’s the continually rising steroid controversy.

Suddenly, the thing that brought many of us back to baseball several years ago, the home run race, has been tarnished by whispered words of performance enhancers. Our hulking heros swear there’s nothing fishy going on, though all of America can hear their genitalia shrinking from those silly ole’ steroids.

But who can blame them for popping pills, really? I mean, if I had to fail drug testing six times before seeing any repercussions, I’d play fast and lose with the rules too, if I had a chance of getting in the record books.

So there you have it. A craptastic sport made worse by people who feel the need to cheat at it.

Give me football anyday. Give me basketball or women’s soccer or golf, or hell, televised poker; just keep your crappy baseball, I don’t need it and neither does the rest of America.

Communists or no, we know what we like.

Thus, go Bears!