A big day for baseball

Today will forever be remembered as a day of highs and lows for Major League Baseball. It started with the low, when Melky Cabrera of the San Francisco Giants was suspended for 50 games for testing positive for a banned substance.

Cabrera was voted the MVP of the 2012 All-Star Game, as was having the season of his career. Entering the day, his .346 batting average was second in the National League, trailing only Andrew McCutchen of the Pittsburgh Pirates (.355). For a guy who was about to become a free agent after this year, Cabrera likely cost himself a very large payday.

His 50-game suspension will not only cost him millions of dollars (it will alone cost him nearly two-million dollars for the games he will miss this year), but it also puts baseball in the hot seat once again. With baseball’s popularity at an all-time high, this was simply a black eye that it did not need. The fact that Cabrera did not deny his wrongdoing makes it that much worse.

The positive aspect about this, is the fact it shows that Major League Baseball’s steroid testing program is working. Not only is that important for the integrity of the game, but it’s also a key step towards possibly getting baseball back in the Olympics.

However, it didn’t take long before baseball was able to show how wonderful it can be, and it was all thanks to “King” Felix Hernandez of the Seattle Mariners.

There’s no denying that Hernandez is one of the best pitchers in all of baseball. In his young career he’s already won a Cy Yound Award and has been selected to three All-Star Games. Today, he did something that he’s never done before, and that’s pitch a perfect game.

Hernandez retired all 27 of the Tampa Bay Rays he faced in order en route to pitching just the 23rd perfect game in Major League Baseball history. Without a doubt, it was one of the best highlights of the 2012 season so far.