Major League Baseball Enjoying New Golden Age

Listen to the critics of the game and they will tell you baseball is a dying sport. They will tell you the age of the average baseball fan gets older every year because younger people don't care about the game anymore.

The critics will tell you kids don't follow baseball any more because the game is too slow and too boring in this age of instant gratification. They need games that have more action, more violence, like basketball or football or soccer (although personally I don't know if there has ever been an activity more boring than soccer. Maybe watching paint dry or grass grow).

It's fashionable to criticize baseball these days, especially given the steroid controversy, and Lord knows the fools who run baseball (that means you, Bud Selig) deserve to be lambasted. Sometimes, it seems they are hell bent on killing the game, but they never can. It's almost as if baseball keeps reinventing itself.

I am reminded of what the great sportscaster Bob Costas once said about baseball. He said metaphysicians should use baseball to prove the existence of God because no man could have created a game as great as baseball.

Now, in the past I felt like I had to defend baseball, especially after the strike in 1994 wiped out the World Series, something that two world wars couldn't do. But I no longer feel I need to defend my favorite sport.

This is not to say the game is perfect, far from it. For one thing, I'd like to see weekend World Series games played in the afternoon and earlier starting times for night games - 7:30 on the East Coast, instead of 8:30 or 8:40. And do away with the dreaded designated hitter.
And more than anything else, get the steroids out of the game.

Still, not only is baseball not dying, but I believe it is enjoying a renaissance the likes of which the game never has seen. The numbers don't lie. For the second straight year, Major League Baseball is on pace to set an attendance record.