Welcome to the greatest blog ever!!! Ok, maybe not, but thanks for stopping by. I’ll be writing a couple of times of week for you and every Monday, we’ll have “Mailbag Monday” where the blog will consist of me answering emails from you the viewers. Send me your questions at tpeters@ksfy.com Other days, when I’m not running all over the place for Thor, I’ll drop some other thoughts that are running thru my head.

First, let me preface this blog, it’s not going to be grammatically correct as I’m one of the worst grammer guys to ever step foot on this planet. Some of you will say, but you are on TV. Folks, let me tell you, the way one writes for TV is not for thesis papers. A lot of our writing is run on sentences, with dangling participles (you like that), fragments, incomplete sentences. Many of us in the “biz” employ the infamous, ….. to represent comma’s, periods, etc. We pause when we feel like it (or when we run out of breath) or when the prompter person decides to drift off to outer-space and fails to keep up with me….so bare with me if improper grammar annoys you. I’ll try to proof-read and correct my mistakes, but if I miss something, well I’m not perfect.

Moving on, for those of you who don’t know me, I’m a die-hard baseball fan. I grew up in the greatest baseball city ever, St. Louis, thus making me a die-hard Cardinals fan. It’s in your blood to eat, sleep and breath Cardinals baseball if you are from the Gateway City. I also have XM radio so I can listen to games when I’m out on the road. It’s not just the Cards I love watching, I just love baseball in general. While I was surfing the net recently, I ran across a column talking about the lack of African American’s playing America’s Pastime.  

According to Ken Griffey, Jr., he claims a reason for the decline is due to how Barry Bonds was treated. Seriously, are you kidding me? That’s got to be the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard.

Reporter says: “So Billy, how come you don’t like baseball?”

Billy says “Well I just saw how mean you guys were to Barry and therefore I didn’t want to play.”

Sorry Junior, but I’m just not buying that. Barry was a jerk. He wasn’t well liked by the media because he always claimed everyone was out to get him. To me athletes need to talk to the media when they have good days and bad days. You can’t just choose to talk when things are going good (certain schools in the area should take note of this) Could Barry hit a baseball, you bet he could. In his prime, he was the best five tool baseball player in the game. But talk to some of his former teammates, he simply wasn’t a great guy/teammate to be around. It’s documented how difficult it was for teammates to get along with the games home run king. So for Junior to say blacks aren’t playing baseball because Barry wasn’t treated nice in the media is absurd.

Baseball in general isn’t as popular as it once was. It’s got nothing to do with how the media portrayed Bonds. If MLB is so worried about this problem, maybe they should do something about it. Maybe kids are turned off because MLB looked the other way while players were cheating. You can’t tell me Bud Selig didn’t know players were taking steroids. All Bud saw was the turnstiles turning, record attendance, and people enjoying baseball for the first time in decades. But now, if I were to take my family to a game, I’d have to take out a second mortgage. Going to a game is crazy. It’s expensive. As a child, my parents took me to several games a year. I get home once a year to catch a game, and that’s expensive for just my wife and I. I think that’s a concern why interest in the game is down. Not because Barry was mistreated.

Until we talk again