“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”
- Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. - August 28, 1963 - “I Have a Dream”
I am a baseball fan. As a child I had the devotion of a child, and I was devoted to baseball: playing organized and disorganized games during the day, listening to games on the radio when I was supposed to be sleeping at night. From 1991-1993 I had the starting rosters for every team in the National League memorized, and I still have the thousands of cheap baseball cards from that era of mass production stuffed under a bed.
I am a Phillies fan. The Phillies are the losingest franchise in sports, having lost more than 10,000 games in their 124-year history. But as a kid living outside Philadelphia I wore their numbers (#3 for Dale Murphy when he was traded from the Braves) in Little League and I kept the radio on softly at night, just loud enough to hear Harry Kalas and Richie Ashburn talk about the Phillies’ past and present, and too soft for my parents to hear. When the radio was confiscated it was as close to hell as an eight-year-old boy can imagine. Every season ended like a Passover meal: “Next year …”
I did not devote myself to baseball in the same way after the 1994 strike. We bought a computer, we moved to Virginia, and a daily glance at the standings proved sufficient. God, girls, and grades were now the dominant forces in my life. Ashburn, a Hall of Famer from the tragic “Whiz Kids” Phillies team of 1950, died in 1997 and the city and the fans still grieve his loss.
I came back to the playoffs in 2001 when the Arizona Diamondbacks ended the Yankees’ dominance in a brilliant seven game series featuring a former Phillie, Curt Schilling. Since then I have watched the playoffs every year, especially when I lived with a rabid Red Sox fan in 2003-2004.
Baseball still has a strong pull on me. Last week I had my sixteen-month-old son Caleb on my lap watching This Week in Baseball, a show I remember from my youth. Suddenly I heard Kalas’ voice once again calling a home run, and the words “outta here!” seized me. A lump in my throat and tears in my eyes made me realize it had been twelve years since I had listened to Kalas call a game. I changed the channel.
I want Caleb to love baseball. I believe baseball is America, though perhaps not in the same way George Will perceives it. Baseball is a classical game, a game of order and precision and a long history which weighs on every player, every manager, and every fan. “Tinker to Evans to Chance” is still the best 6-4-3 double play combination in history, we still wonder if Bob Gibson could have struck out Ty Cobb, and every record stands as a wall, daring the present to assert itself as the pinnacle, the ultimate period in the game’s history.
That is why I will always tell Caleb that Barry Bonds is not the all-time home run leader. There are several reasons.
In 1993 Lenny Dykstra, my favorite player to ever wear a Phillies uniform, played in 161 games. He had 637 at bats, 194 hits, scored 143 runs, stole 37 bases and batted .305. He also led the Phillies to the World Series, where he hit four home runs. The Phillies had the exact same team as the year before, but Dykstra had been injured (broken hand because of Greg Maddox) and the Phillies finished last in 1992. Dykstra was the Most Valuable Player in the National League.
But Barry Bonds got the award because he hit 46 home runs, even though his Giants didn’t make it to the playoffs. I’m writing this in the spirit of disclosure, so you know there’s a history between me and Bonds.
Peformance enhancing drugs should be illegal. Even though Mark McGwire took andro, a drug that was not illegal in baseball, I think his records should have an asterisk. The fact that Bonds considerably bulked up in one off-season (and coincidentally going from 34 home runs in 1999 to 49 home runs in 2000), the fact that steroids improve eyesight, and the fact that his trainer sits in jail for contempt of court for refusing to testify to a grand jury all cause me to doubt that Bonds really hit 756 home runs through hard work and not cheating.
That’s the same grand jury which, if it had indicted Bonds in 2006 (before the refusal to testify), would have prompted Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig to suspend Bonds.
But most importantly, I don’t ever want my son to think that taking a drug in order to gain an advantage in a game is OK. We celebrate athletes because of their hard work, dedication, and sacrifice. To succeed at the professional level requires years of single-minded focus on improving one’s reflexes, strength, and instincts. Short cuts and half measures cast doubt on sport itself, and tarnish the ideals which athletics promotes. If we’re not going to demand that athletes live by high standards on the field, then what’s the point? It’s not like watching baseball is exciting.
And no, it’s not because Bonds is African-American. As a baseball fan I worship the memory of Hank Aaron, Josh Gibson, Satchel Paige, and Jackie Robinson. Ozzie Smith and Tony Gwynn are two more recent stars I hold in high regard. Ryan Howard, the Phillie who hit 58 home runs last year, is African-American and I don’t care.
But if Howard is using steroids, my answer would be the same: banish him from baseball. Kick him out, strip him of his records, expunge his name from history.
And that’s why I will never honor Barry Bonds, and I will teach my son to do the same.
This is a post I promised to do as my first “out of retirement” event. But I just started as Bruce Roemmelt’s campaign manager, so it’s back to retirement for me. See you in November.
