Strikes and Balks: A list of things ailing Major League Baseball

Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire aren’t walking through that door.

Twenty-four years after two of the most prominent faces of the steroid era saved baseball after the strike of 1994-95 by combing to hit 136 home runs in 1998, the question begs to be asked, “who will save baseball this time?” after regular-season games have been canceled for the first time in 27 years due to the current labor dispute.

For baseball and sports fans that are approaching the age of 30, this is a new experience for them, as they only know a world in which Opening Day is an annual event, a sports holiday. But, that won’t be the case after Rob Manfred shut down the event and the first two series of the season on Tuesday.

“So far, we have failed to achieve our mutual goal of a fair deal. The unfortunate thing is that the agreement we have offered has huge benefits for fans and players,” the commissioner wrote in a letter to fans. However, being skeptical of anything Manfred says or does is par for the course given that he’s the only reason why Roger Goodell isn’t the worst commissioner in all of sports.

Eventually, baseball will be back. But what we don’t know is what kind of shape the game will be in when it returns, or how diehard fans will feel about it. However, that could be the least of their problems because as the game falls further and further behind the NFL and NBA in popularity, attempting to engage casual fans and a more diverse audience has been what’s held baseball back the most.

Life is about wants and needs. And in this situation, the forever fans are the “need,” while casual fans and a more diverse audience are the “want.” So, if baseball is ever going to evolve it’s going to need its fans to stick with them while simultaneously finding a way to clean up its act so that others will want to tune in.

Here’s a list of those things that need to be addressed:

When the infinite number of unwritten rules in your sport are often referred to as “playing the white way” then it’s easy to understand why African-Americans only made up 7 percent of players on Opening Day rosters in 2021. Baseball has historically done Black people wrong and continues to. And if the sport wants to grow, it has to change that.

In 2017, a fan at Boston’s Fenway Park threw a bag of peanuts at Orioles outfielder Adam Jones, and he says he was called the ‘n-word’ by fans. “A disrespectful fan threw a bag of peanuts at me,’’ Jones said, “I was called the N-word a handful of times tonight. Thanks. Pretty awesome.’

“It’s pathetic,’’ Jones said. “It’s called a coward. What they need to do is that instead of kicking them out of the stadium, they need to fine them 10 grand, 20 grand, 30 grand. Something that really hurts somebody. Make them pay in full. And if they don’t, take it out of their check.”

The racist actions by those Fenway fans prompted an anti-racist group to drape a sign on the Green Monster that read “Racism is as American as Baseball.”

In 2018, MLB was dealing with multiple players having their old tweets dug up in which they were saying plenty of hateful things. And to make things worse, in the case of pitcher Josh Hader, he got cheered by fans after he returned to the mound as if he was some type of hero. A few months later, we found out that the league donated money to Republican Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith after she publicly said of one of her supporters, “If he invited me to a public hanging, I’d be on the front row.”

Last year, we found out that Manfred was in negotiations with Barstool — America’s most racist, misogynist, and prejudiced sports site — to broadcast midweek games, and then two months later the league had announcers making slave references during a game as Jim Kaat said he wanted to “get a 40-acre field full of ‘em” about Chicago’s Yoán Moncada, who’s Cuban.

For some reason, Major League Baseball still hasn’t heeded the words of the late-great James Brown and realized that this world is “nothing without a woman or a girl.” When the Marlins made Kim Ng (above) the first female GM in league history, it was a happy and sad moment. Happy because she finally broke through the glass ceiling. Sad because it took so damn long.

Ng is still the only female GM in the sport. That needs to change. Earlier this year, the Yankees made Rachel Balkovec the first female manager in minor league history, as she’s the skipper for the Tampa Tarpons.

There’s never been a sport, outside of boxing, that has a history that features so many cheating scandals as baseball. Every era has a “thing,” and in this one, the Houston Astros are the runaway champs as they went high- and low-tech with their trickery that “allegedly” included everything from banging on trash cans to iPads and electronic buzzing devices that told hitters what pitches were coming. And despite all that happened with the Astros, baseball still has to live with the fact that after the “dismantling” of that team, the very same franchise was just two games away from winning another World Series last fall.

Oh yeah, last season also featured the “ sticky substance” scandal that players were using to get an unfair advantage.

Presentation is key, however, that’s a concept that Major League Baseball has never fully grasped. Most entities at least know how to “fake it,” but not baseball. It doesn’t even try to act like it cares about how it comes off.

During the peak of the pandemic, when hospitalizations and deaths were happening by the hour, the league’s World Series winner was allowing positive-testing Dodgers infielder Justin Turner to run around the field maskless so that he could celebrate and pose in the center of pictures with his teammates on national TV. You had to see it to believe it.

The reigning World Series champs are also still called the “Braves” despite how wrong that feels, especially after the team in Cleveland became the Guardians, and the football team in D.C. changed its name from a racist slur for Native Americans to the Washington Commanders. And fans at Truist Park are still doing the “Tomahawk Chop” as if it isn’t vile and offensive to mock this country’s first inhabitants.

And then there’s the fact that the Los Angeles Angels just had one of their executives found guilty for giving Tyler Skaggs the fentanyl-laced drugs that killed him.