The biggest, fastest, and possibly dumbest creature to roam the earth since dinosaurs is professional baseball and like dinosaurs baseball's inevitable extinction is just as predictable. What pushes a sport to the brink of doom? Let's examine how baseball illustrates a disturbing fact; the age of the sports dinosaur is drawing to a bitter and sudden close.

Baseball. Why did it resonate for so long? Why was it cherished for almost 150 years? Why does it seem so hollow and phony now? You have to go back to the beginning to see why the end of professional baseball is near.

Baseball isn't just the national pastime it is the national pastime and for good reason. Baseball was incubated in the civil war and afterwards became the panacea that healed a divided nation. Baseball was bigger in all aspects than we can imagine today, it held the promise of spring, the struggle of summer and the decay and finality of fall so perfectly in balance it's hard to imagine life without it.

The rhythms and pace are as perfect as the diamond it's played upon. It's the great equalizer. There is a profound truth to its demands. The ball, the bat, the glove, the dimensions immutably played across nine innings, three outs, and a box score that sings the game across time. Brandeis said, sports is truth because once it was reduced to a box score there were no interpretations, no gray areas just the game as it was played forever fixed in the amber of Linotype.

The earliest professional teams rose and fell like summer corn. The players an amalgam of college graduates, drunks, and shifty characters were every bit as dodgy as the grifters and con men that owned the clubs. There was no privilege between the lines that mattered save your baseball pedigree. It didn't matter that Rube Waddell was mad as a hatter and twice as childlike, on the mound he was un-hittable and just as likely to chase a fire engine, as he was to strike out the side. His manager, Connie Mack, for fear he would disappear on a bender, doled his salary out a few bucks at a time.

Race played no part in the beginning it wasn't until Hall of Famer Cap Anson, a de####able racist, led a cabal that drove Black players from the game in the late 1800's and then like a Shakespearian tragedy it took the man who saved baseball Judge Landis to maintain that prejudice until his death when Branch Rickey and Jackie Robinson shattered that vile barrier six decades later. But don't get all misty-eyed.

The Negro League in its day was the 3rd largest black owned and operated business, and cornerstone of the Black community, their players were every bit the equal of any major league player. Robinson may have broken the barrier but the barrier fell directly on top of the Negro League. Nor were the Dodgers all that racially smart or advanced. To maintain a quota system that suppressed black players in the majors after Robinson and Larry Doby broke the color barrier they lost Roberto Clemente to the Pirates in the Rule 5 draft because they already had their quota filled on the Dodgers roster. But none of this is news to any real baseball fan.

Baseball stars in every era were considered family heirlooms passed on from father to son, each adding his own layer. It was a legacy and a trust. But all that began to change in the 1970's. It isn't fair to blame baseball for the changing environment of sports or even society. Nevertheless baseball withstood much change without the bedrock shifting. But like a Brontosaurus or a T-Rex seeing the meteor cross the sky that would kill them it didn't understand its time was over.

Baseball has spilled more ink than any other sport. It has a lyricism that attracts great writers to scribble great things. But suddenly newspapers faced their own extinction. Great dailies fell all across the country, as cable supplanted print media and now sports, once the favorite section of the daily paper, was a click away for an increasingly lazy and entertainment jaded public. Baseball a sport that thrived because it was the only affordable entertainment for the poor and middle class saw it's impact and place dwindle as the price of tickets pushed aside all but the deepest corporate pockets.

Family owned teams sold out to corporations who care only about the bottom line. Media companies bought teams for programming and chucked them into the hungry maw of 24-hour sports channels without understanding or caring about tradition. Baseball became another commodity measured in ratings. Like earth inverting underneath a flood ravaged dike, tradition washed and whirled away and by the time of the last real commissioner, Fay Vincent, the only thing owners cared about was whacking up billions in profits and everything else be damned.

Over expansion, fueled by a lust for the billions it brought current owners in entry fees, diluted the quality of the players, to compensate the mound was lowered until pitchers could barely pitch six injury free innings a game over an entire season even on 5 days rest. Under the greedy and clearly dumbest commissioner, Bud Selig, owner by proxy of the Milwaukee Brewers, major league baseball extorted new stadiums from taxpayers and then priced them out of attending. Attendance still rose as corporate box seats and the wealthy supplanted the dopes that paid for the stadium and ratings rose like a bubble until an unlikely pin, steroids, popped it.

Steroids are the genie let out of the bottle of real fan discontent. Players like Roger Clemens and Barry Bonds put a real face on a problem created, fostered and supported by MLB, owners, and teams. Baseball was all a lie. The thing we cherished and grew up with was gone. Replaced by a shimmering Vegas resort mirage. When fan outrage finally brick walled the mealy-mouthed Selig he tried to whitewash it with the Mitchell Report. But nobody was biting. With each new revelation, an ugly truth was left flopping and gasping for air like a fish made out of raw sewage.

Look at the baseball landscape today. There are only two teams, the Yankees and the Red Sox and $100 million dollars in salary behind them is every other team. Sure they don't win the World Series every season, but most. It isn't even a league it's like Batman and Superman fighting to the death with the rest of the Justice League happily sucking mocha lattes at a Starbucks.

The other teams are content to grab the TV cash and act as a feeder system. But the sport no longer resonates. It no longer captures the heart, mind and soul of our nation. There isn't a single player that isn't playing under the su####ion of performance enhancing drugs. Their personal lives are displayed like a colonoscopy so any hope of them ever being a hero to a small child is unlikely and finally when you do go to a ballpark, they fiscally rape you so hard it leaves a bad taste in your mouth.

Baseball should look at hockey and figure it out. Once a sport stops resonating, canceling a season or signing the wrong TV contract, makes it very easy for Americans to simply walk away. Right now baseball is kicking dirt over that cliff. Baseball will reap what it sows. Fans unfortunately inherit the wind.