It's fun to watch perhaps, but the world-wide mania over record chasing seems to have entirely died with the steroid usage around the Bonds era.

The rampant doping got so bad they had a highly publicized congressional hearing about it. I doubt it ever stopped.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doping_in_baseball#Congression...

It may not have stopped entirely, but there are much better safeguards in place, and it's pretty obvious based on power hitting statistics (home runs mainly) that it's not even close to as bad as it was in the 90's and early 2000's. The penalties for getting caught doping are quite high.

Most recently, superstar San Diego Padres player Fernando Tatis Jr. was suspended for 80 games after testing positive for steroid use. [1]

[1] https://www.baseball-almanac.com/legendary/steroids_baseball...

True, but IMO doping is much less of an existential threat to the game than computer-assisted cheating is for chess.

There was also some sign stealing scandal but I didn’t pay much attention.

And the umpires are the dirtiest cheaters of all and always win.

At one point in time they would literally fix the World Series. This was a long time ago, but yeah, baseball had big issues with integrity. The steroids thing is nothing compared to how bad it used to be.