Well the discussion on importance was originally on the records, at some point my fingers chose to ignore the brain and typed “rules” instead. Either way though in the great scheme of life neither is important, there’s the real world and then there’s sports. And while some of us spend a lot of time on sports they’re still just sports, an idle distraction to chew up spare hours.
Lack of enforcement showed the MLB didn’t actually care. And it’s not like the government did much in the way of enforcement either. It was a minority in the press but it was a pretty vocal minority. One thing to remember is that the late 90s early 2000s was the high watermark for what I call “complaint reporting” in the sports journalism crowd, most sports reporters spent most of their time complaining about something, Jim Rome is the posterboy complaint reporting. Among the things they complained about were steroids in baseball.
On an individual player basis nothing was known and certainly there was plenty of push for innocence until guilt was proven. But it was well known that there was a steroid problem in baseball, if only because their anti-steroid rule was such a pathetic joke, everybody knew that MLB was turning a blind eye to a growing situation. No one was really sure how much it was growing not many were trying to guess which players, but it was the only one of our sports which was doing absolutely no drug testing and had no schedule of punishments for violating the steroid rule. The emperor clearly had no clothes.
Baseball is in a free market, it competes with other sports, other TV and movies for your entertainment dollar and minute. If you don’t like what’s happening in a sport you can just stop watching. You said you stopped watching MLB after the strike, so obviously you can stop watching. I stopped watching the NBA when they outlawed zone defense (IMHO the stupidest sports rule that’s ever been written), I would watch NCAA or no basketball at all. If you decide that watching the World Series is more important than your objections to how the sport is being run that’s fine, but understand that’s a decision you made. That’s you deciding that whatever complaints you have about steroids in baseball are not as major as your desire to watch the Series, it’s a perfectly valid decision but it’s demonstrative of how important you think the steroid issue is. Which is why we know that in spite of any lip service pay in polls the steroid issue isn’t that important to the fan base, we know this because the fan base is spending a record amount of time and money on the game, if they really thought the steroid issue was that huge this wouldn’t be the case.
One other thing to note on the lack of importance of the issue to the fans. You said that a steroid thread on FR would get 1000 posts in a day, well the Mitchell Report threads started about 20 hours ago and the 3 I can find don’t even add up to 500 forget any of them getting near 1000. The steroid issue in baseball generates a lot of sound and fury but in the end it signifies nothing.
I think we've both had our say, and I leave it here.