No good deed goes unpunished

With little doubt, the home opener for the Colorado Rockies, April 4 against the Arizona Diamondbacks, will see a soldout crowd of ravenous Rox fans ready to dust off their old mitts and hope not only for the chance at snagging a foul ball but also for another World Series berth.
But that's not to say the Rockies, or Major League Baseball for that matter, are doing so well these days.
A caveat: I've never been the kind of person to show up for Opening Day. I've always seen it as an overhyped event where the ownership can bet on a sellout crowd before ticket sales trickle on down. Maybe it's generational: I've been able to cover multiple teams from the start of spring training for more than a decade now thanks to the Internet — it's not like Opening Day is the first I've seen or heard from the major leagues since last October.
And therein lies one of the problems: The Steroids Era has endured another winter of utter embarassment, with the Mitchell Report, Brian McNamee, Andy Pettite, Roger Clemens, Barry Bonds and all the rest turning a Capitol Hill drama into the biggest sports story of the past few months outside of the Patriots' 18-1 season.
Even if you were still bleeding Rockies purple after they were swept in the World Series by the Boston Red Sox (who no longer deserve the 'lovable loser' tag), it's hard to swallow 'Spring baseball is here!' after hours and hours of media coverage of the performance-enhancing drugs scandal. Maybe I'm too casual a fan, but I don't know if I'll get the bad taste out of my mouth until after the NFL Draft.
The biggest issue here is how this hurts Major League Baseball, and in my mind, the Rockies. The Rockies, in my estimation, have been set up for disaster. There's no way of recapturing the incredible run they had to make the playoffs and then sweep their way into the Fall Classic. As smart as it was to not pay Kaz Matsui more money than he's really worth, he'll surely be missed this season. Also, the euphoria of re-signing so many core players like Troy Tulowitzki and Matt Holliday and Brad Hawpe will inevitably be washed away by the spanking the young pitching staff will endure at the hands of some greatly improved National League foes, including Joe Torre's Dodgers, the reloaded New York Mets and the always-dangerous Arizona Diamondbacks.
It's too great of a high to come down from — and adding in all the other problems that plague America's Once and Future Pastime, that great season the Rockies gave us in 2007 is nothing more than a sweet memory, ready to be forgotten as soon as the regular season record dips below .500 sometime in June.
This isn't to say the Rockies won't be a good team, a playoff-caliber team this year — it's just many of us won't be able to see it for what it's worth until the season is already halfway over.