It's difficult to watch baseball through the eyes of a 9-year-old. Unless, that is, you were born in 1996. Har har…
Seriously, though, there are those moments-like when Scott Rolen rips a homerun off Roger Clemens in Game 7 of the NLCS-that I am reminded of days when I handled baseball cards with a tweezers, memorized the stats of the Expos backup shortstop (for no apparent reason) and called each and every player by their Chris Berman-provided nickname. In my eyes, these were the men who created Rome.
I still love baseball, probably more than any other sport. I still waste tons of money that I should be saving every summer, and every October if I'm lucky, on Cardinals tickets. I occasionally obsess over the Redbirds. However, the days are gone when ballplayers-and I mean each and every ballplayer (yes, even Tom Pagnozzi)-walked onto the field with an aura of mystique about them. To a kid, any big league uniform is impressive. I've been lucky enough not to have a whole lot of personal trauma in my life, so it's pretty easy to pinpoint something as minor as the moment when baseball lost its full-force luster for me. It was August of 1994, and there was a strike.
Suddenly, SportsCenter was full of players going to meetings, wearing suits. My dad went to meetings in suits-not baseball players. And these players and their representatives were at these meetings, asking for more money. Here I was under the impression that they were all millionaires and demi-gods already. What more could they need?
So, they canceled the World Series and it finally occurred to me-these baseball players are just like other men. They eat the same food as me. Some of them live in the same city as me. They can be greedy, they can be assholes, they can want more money, and some of them are not even worth the money they get. I lost interest for awhile. I lost interest in baseball-wow.
Perhaps, if I could have kept this glimmering image of baseball stars, I would have worked a little harder. You know, increased my range from third to first and practiced rolling my wrists through a swing. Well…my athletic talents are fairly limited-so, even if I kept at it, I would probably never have better than warning track power. I can't blame it all on the strike.
Eventually, though, baseball did come back. I halfheartedly tried to resist, but my attention was sparked again by the Cardinals and their 1996 NL-runners-up season. Shortly after, the Mark McGwire homerun saga went on the road and the rest of America was interested again too.
When my college years began, I moved back to St. Louis from Kansas City and got a chance to experience baseball in October, first-hand. This was something I dreamed of when I was 9 years old; but I feared the experience was limited to folks who lived in Minnesota, Toronto, Oakland or Atlanta. I was finally back, in a baseball town.
It always was, and still is, a great sport. Yet, it's not quite the same…
In his congressional hearing on steroids last week, McGwire talked about the pressure of playing professional baseball. Ballplayers have known this pressure before.
One of the saddest stories in all of sports was that of Shoeless Joe Jackson and the 1919 Black Sox. And it's not sad in the sentimental way "Field of Dreams" would have you believe.
No, Joe Jackson was not wrongfully outcast or a patsy of any sort. He may not have thrown any games, but he knew what he was doing by taking the gamblers' payoff, and he knew it was wrong. He didn't do it because he needed the money-after all, he grew up on a dirt farm in the Carolinas and thought he was rich playing for a few thousand dollars a year. No, he did it because he was a quiet, reclusive, painfully uneducated man (he literally signed his name with an "X") who wanted to fit in with the other baseball stars of his day. His "friends" said it was a good idea-who was he to doubt them?
In his testimony, Mark McGwire said he was protecting his "friends."
I do not like these hearings and, I hate the fact that a few overzealous House members are given the opportunity to grandstand for publicity. I don't like the brazen implications that it is the baseball players' fault some kids chose to do steroids and subsequently died. True, maybe it is better in the long run, for fans and the general public to know what has been going on for the past 10 years in the MLB.
In the short run, though, I'm sad-for 9-year-olds. Players are going to meetings in suits again. They are appearing on TV and denying charges being brought against them.
Criminals go to court and deny charges-not ballplayers: or do they?
