What Do We Tell Our Kids?

I love baseball.
I love everything about it.
I love holding the ball and feeling the stitches beneath my fingertips. Throwing it and feeling it return to nestle in my glove to be thrown again.
Baseball is like a living religion whose lore and legend is unveiling before us as we remember the lows of 1919 and the Black Sox scandal and the way a gargoyle faced mountain of a man rose out of that turmoil to make it stronger than ever before.
We remember how The Travelling Man carved his legend in anonymity and under the veil of persecution and how a fiercely competitive former army man broke through those chains to clear the way for anyone who can carry a glove to be able to play on the same field no matter what their background was.
More recently we remember a time when baseball wasn’t played and while the guardians of baseball squabbled, the followers started to doubt it until 1998 when two giants put on a powerful display that had never been seen before, once again bringing baseball back to the hearts of the masses but now more doubt has been placed upon those two apparent saviours.
Ballplayers are bigger and faster than ever before but now we find our innocence has been almost completely washed away and we are left to ask if the gods of this religion of baseball have been cast out of heaven and crashed down to Earth naked, vulnerable and fallible like a mere mortal?
Right now we are living in the era of Barry Bonds, a man who is dominating the game like no one has since The Sultan of Swat tiptoed around the bases in New York but on the horizon looms the dark cloud of BALCO which is threatening to rain heavily upon The Garden of Eden amid fears that some have eaten the forbidden fruit.
No one can defend the use of steroids but it seems almost assumed that whenever someone jacks it to the upper deck that they must be on steroids. Flax seed oil is getting more credit than a genuine legend on his path to immortality based on an assumption or a leaked document that has no chance of ever being verified in terms of credibility. I’ve even heard that Barry Bonds’ all time walk record is down to ‘roids even though he has never failed to gain 100 walks in a season in which he has played at least 109 games. Granted his status at the top of that category is more down to Rickey’s (Henderson) hiatus from The Bigs (he still looms large somewhere out there) but can’t we give Bonds some credit?
Major League Baseball has been decidedly backwards in terms of coming to grips with the drug issue and even now the rules are exceedingly limp when compared to any other sport but what rules there are have not been proven to have been broken by Bonds, Sheffield or any other name people feel needs to be dragged through the mud so how can we pile all this hyperbole on these guys? Can’t we just accept that some players truly are great? Don’t we want to worship these people the way we worshipped their forebears? Have we become so cynical?
Some people will think that I’m naïve (in fact I know of a few people who do) in my views on this issue but I’m not totally oblivious to the fact that Bonds has exploded into a place that no one else has ever gone to in the last few years after looking like he was starting to count down the years at the end of his career. I have noticed that a guy like Jason Giambi, who actually has admitted to prior transgressions, has gone from being a muscle bound slugger to a slightly large strikeout accumulator and that his physique and the actual change of that physique bares a striking resemblance to that of a few other sluggers who aren’t slugging so much these days. I do know that when Mark McGwire admitted to taking ‘supplements’ what he meant was he was taking things that weren’t classified as steroids at the time. There is plenty of fuel to light the fire of suspicion and I guess some are more willing to strike the match and watch it burn than I but I’d much rather curse MLB for not having a drugs testing policy until now and lament the loss of Ken Caminiti who might have been able to get the help he obviously needed when he was playing. I curse the fact that we are questioning the achievements of a whole generation of great ballplayers because the commissioners office was so short sighted and has left us under a huge cloud of doubt.
So what do we do? Do we believe Jose Canseco and dismiss a whole bunch of players including one who started to fill ballparks all over America for the first time since the debacle of ‘94? Do we assume that when Dave Roberts hits his career high 5th homer of the year that he must be on the juice? Or can we allow ourselves to just go to the ball park and sit in the bleachers with our dog and our beer and just cheer these guys on and marvel at what they are able to achieve when they put a piece of rounded timber in their hand whilst someone shoots a 100mph projectile at them? Can we allow ourselves to deify these guys until they have actually been proven to be little more than the man behind the curtain trying to be something that they’re not?
Baseball has so many great stories in its history that get told from one generation to the next so what will our generation tell the next? Will you tell your children, “Oh you shoulda seen him” or will you say, “He was great but never caught?” Can’t we at least try to see a half full glass?