The Beginning of Baseball Season

To the typical person, March 31st is just another day to send in your rent check, or flip your calendar over to April. But for me and thousands of my colleagues it is a day of rekindling an annual love affair with America’s pass-time. A day where even fans of the lowliest teams in baseball can have hope and take comfort that any given afternoon they can turn on the television and see their favorite player smash a walk-off homer.
This season is different than others given the ongoing steroid scandal and the release of the Mitchell report implicating several current and former players of steroid use. Even as an ominous cloud hovers over all of baseball, fans still flock to ballparks to see their teams open the season. Indeed the steroid scandal does not seem to diminish the population’s love affair with baseball. The evidence isn’t just in the loyal fans but also in the numbers. According to an article by Chris Isidore of CNN, the revenue of Major League Baseball has doubled since 2000 to around $6 billion dollars. Comparatively, the National Football League has grown at roughly half the rate of Major League Baseball since 2000.

As the season continues there will surely be more information released about the Mitchell report and the implicated players involved. While this fact may deter the skeptics from following baseball as avidly as they did before this steroid era, the real fans of baseball will ignore the accusations and finger pointing and enjoy the competition pageantry and unparalleled tradition of the sport. Take me out to the ballgame.