Major League baseball is making some progress in correcting what ails it, but there is still a long way to go before The Great American Pastime is restored to what it once was. The main problem is the outrageous salaries that players are demanding. Some have contracts totaling hundreds of millions of dollars. This has taken the game away from teams in the so-called small markets, who are unable to generate the revenue to compete with teams from the bigger cities and those that are owned by deep-pocket billionaires. A notable exception to this is the Minnesota Twins, world champions in 1987 and 1991, who have done well the American League despite a payroll at or near the bottom of both leagues and attendance figures also near the bottom. The Twins prove that heart, desire, determination and skilled ownership and management can sometimes defeat the big-money clubs. In order for more teams such as the Twins to break the stranglehold put on baseball by teams like the New York Yankees, the Boston Red Sox, the Atlanta Braves and the Seattle Mariners, it will be necessary to continue and even increase the sharing of revenue, or the big rich clubs helping the smaller teams financially. This is something advocated by Commissioner Bud Selig but resisted by the megabucks owners like George Steinbrenner. What is needed to get baseball back on the right track is more revenue sharing, with money passing from the haves to the have-nots, and some kind of salary cap to keep salaries from getting too far out of line. These ideas have been used successfully by the NFL and the NBA, both of which have more parity from top to bottom. The other thing that is needed in baseball is a rule against steroids, the type Mark McGwire and others have used to increase power. Those substances should be banned from baseball as they are form other professional and amateur sports, so kids won’t be tempted to imitate their idols. submitted by Robert Roble18@aol.com