Wallace Matthews Is Done With the Demon Baseball

Steroids are bad. If there is anything the hackneyed newspaper columnists of the world would like get across to you, the fan, it's that: Steroids are bad, the people who took them are evil (rather than flawed but ultimately normal people), and everyone who allowed them to pollute the previously incorruptible national pastime deserves to, I don't know, be flogged or something. Steroid anger is a particularly silly, and yet finely distilled, brand.

Newsday columnist Wallace Matthews is a good example. Today, Wallace informs us (via Calcaterra) that baseball is a sham sport and nothing can be done to instill a sense of reality back into the game:

After much contemplation, I came up with the answer. Nothing.

For all the tough talk from Selig and for all the hand-wringing and mea culpas coming lately from Rodriguez, the fact is, this game is rigged so that nothing of, um, substance, can be done about it.

Haha. Nothing of "substance." Like controlled substances? That's a good one.

Of course, if the game is rigged, that must mean that Matthews -- a New York-based sportswriter with a readership highly interested in the hometown Mets and Yankees -- will no longer be writing about baseball. Right? Otherwise, as Craig says at Shysterball, if Matthews does keep writing about the "rigged" sport, if in a few months he's back tracking the daily fortunes of New York's teams, then we'll know his schtick is far less genuine than the game he's dismissing.

But of course Wallace won't let that happen, will he? I can't wait to find out! Summers in New York get awful long without baseball around, you know.