[BluesDuke]

I've always loved that song. But here I'm talking about the salivation of the Olde Ball Game, and you're talking about playing centerfield! (Like to see John Fogerty hit one on the dry side...heheheheheheheh)

[newwahoo]

I've gotta give you credit. You managed to defend the undefendable. I'm old enough to remember the emery board falling out of a Perry brothers' (I think) back pocket and I still remember how I thought he should be hanging from someone's foul pole. But then again, I've always been a Law & Order type, so maybe I'm not representative of the fans as a whole. George Brett's pine tar incident seemed to make a deeper impression, even though I was much younger at the time. Maybe it was the way he expressed his innocence...

I don't know Blues, something has been rotten in the state of baseball for a while now. I'm sure many would say that it has been so from before my tender years of viewing strted. The yards and the inside of the plate are just symptoms of a much bigger problem, one that I don't know where to begin to solve. Money, expansion and the longball are interrelated in an unsavory way.

But I'd posit that it all began not long after the sainted Dodgers left Brooklyn! Maybe instead of the famous Red Sox "curse of the bambino", we should start looking at other factors leading towards the decline of baseball. Brooklyn's continuing sense of loss, while other unworthy cities like Tampa Bay and Montreal were rewarded, may be a starting point for what went wrong.

No, I'm not kidding! MLB threw mud in the faces of a strong area of support while continuing to find reasons too expand in areas that are not willing or able to bear the burden. Its when things first started to go south for baseball.