While baseball has managed to stay atop American Sports for the better part of one and a half centuries, the fact that baseball has lost some of it's luster to America's other sport, football, is indisputable. When was the last time andybody said anything along the linees of "So and so might have saved football?" Meanwhile, in the late nineties, baseball was in need of saving, and the unprecedented home run battle between Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire arrived just in time. Don't let anybody fool you, while baseball's stadiums were and still are getting filled at a very respectable game, the game is nowhere close to where it should be, or where it, for the most part, has been. TV ratings are way down, and even during October, when the football season is still in it's infancy and baseball is in the thick of the playoffs, TBS and FOX recorded putrid viewing numbers, some of which were all-time lows.

          Now imagine a game where pitching is dominant and 60 home run seasons are as unlikely as undefeated seasons are in football. With today's instant gratification mindset and the way fans crave the long ball, the casual fan would be extinct. Now imagine what Bud Selig and baseball's owners were up against when the allegations and accusations came about in the early part of the twentieth century. They could do like other sports and set up a real steroid policy at risk of losing the casual fan base, which would devastate a game already reeling from it's losses to the NBA and NFL, or they could turn the other cheek and hope steroids went away. In hindsight, the decision looks pretty easy to make, but was it, and is it, really so? Selig, as it is right now, has put himself in a position where he has no choice but to beef up the steroids policy and severely punish violaters. Ten game game suspensions will become 50 game suspensions and two time violaters will get one or two year bans. Selig has no choice anymore. By setting up the Mitchell investigation, which finally gave real, documented evidence pertaining to the undoubtebly enormous influence of steroids on baseball, Selig has cornered himself and is now forced to do what he didn't do a number of years back. The question now isn't whether or not Selig will toughen up the doping policies. Rather the question is, will baseball be better off for it?