The State of Major League Baseball

The end of the 2007 baseball season has finally arrived. Within the next week, the playoffs will begin and the world will turn its attention to only 8 teams that are preparing to enter the post season and hopefully reach the World Series. It’s the culmination of seven months of training and daily games that finally resulted in only a quarter of the teams that play for those seven months moving on. It’s a cruel schedule and the emotion driving it is intense.

This year’s schedule and related emotional investments has been even more intense than ever before as dozens of milestones and the most hallowed record in all of sports were reached this year by numerous different players. Baseball has resurged from its years of disinterest in the 1990s and the awful strike of 1996 to become more popular than ever before, and the players associated with the game have subsequently undergone more scrutiny than ever before.

The Competition

What can best be remembered about the 2007 Major League Baseball season though? It’s hard to say until the season is over and passed, but the changes are greater than ever. First, the competition. For the first time in years, the level of competition in Major League Baseball has reached an all time high.

The Boston Red Sox have ended an 11 year streak of Eastern Division titles by the New York Yankees, winning their first such title in more than a decade. Many consider the Red Sox to be the strongest team in the major leagues and with one of the best pitching lineups in baseball and some of the best rookies in professional sports this year, they stand the best chance of going all the way.

But it is not just the Red Sox this year that have surprised this year. The Chicago Cubs are poised to win the division for the first time in years and the Milwaukee Brewers are almost back from the brink of last place with a winning season and the Seattle Mariners – despite a late season collapse – managed to end in second place behind the outrageously good Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim.

The Records

The obvious event that was best known to the rest of the world from baseball this season was the hitting of homerun number 756 by Barry Bonds. The most hallowed record in baseball was broken this year by the most controversial personality in sports. The man who once was considered one of the best players in all of baseball, and can arguably still be compared to them now, broke the record but not without a shadow over his head. Barry Bonds has long since become a pariah of the steroid controversy since it was made known that he likely broke the record with the use of some kind of steroids. Further compounding the controversy was the purchase of the record setting baseball by Mark Ecko and the decision of the public to have the ball marked with a permanent asterisk.

Additionally, other players broke milestones in record numbers. Three players hit their 500th home run over the course of the season, an event that will not likely happen again for many more years. Additionally, Tom Glavine reached his 300th win, Roger Clemens his 350th and Sammy Sosa reached his 600th home run.

On almost a weekly basis, a new record or milestone was reached and the baseball community felt that much more energetic. The controversies of the last few years aside, an entire generation of achievement and the accomplishments of more than a dozen players have captured the attention of a nation.

More Popular Than Ever

And so baseball has reached a level of popularity that it hasn’t known for more than three decades when it was truly America’s pastime. As the football season starts and the basketball season sits only a month away, it is the role of baseball to usher the summer back into the fall and for the millions of sports fans across the nation to get ever more involved. The world baseball classic and little league world series along with the continued growth of international participation in the MLB have shown that baseball is not just America’s sport, but the world’s sport.

So, this year, as we wait for the Red Sox, Yankees, Cubs, Angels, Padres, and Indians, along with two other teams that have yet to be decided, to play their way to the World Series, the sports world should truly step back and look at the state of the sport. Baseball will only continue to grow and the popularity will just continue to explode as the dozens of exciting new stars in the sport continue to grow larger and garner more fans. The new era of professional baseball has arrived and the result is a sport that even the fair-weather fan cannot easily ignore.