For my 10th birthday, my father took my brother and me (his birthday is the previous day) to Forbes Field in Pittsburgh to watch the Pittsburgh Pirates play the San Francisco Giants.
For my 10th birthday, my father took my brother and me (his birthday is the previous day) to Forbes Field in Pittsburgh to watch the Pittsburgh Pirates play the San Francisco Giants.
My father loved baseball. He read the agate in the newspapers to get all the stats of all the games. He was supposedly pretty good on the sandlots in his youth, good fielder, scrappy hitter, great on the base paths.
During the game, he pointed out that No. 24 for the Giants would kick third base on his way to center field every inning. He said he did it for good luck. It must have worked ’cause that player, Willie Mays, is regarded as one of the best, if not the best, to ever play the game.
I don’t know if Willie used anything other than his God-given ability (and maybe some Alaga Syrup) to get him going during the games, but he managed to amass a bunch of baseball records on his way to the Hall of Fame.
Too bad, then, that the current crop of ball players seem to have resorted to all kinds of pharmaceutical help to go “Citius, Altius, Fortius.” (Swifter, Higher, Stronger.)
No, I don’t feel sorry for the athletes. This is competition, and if you are competing against someone who goes swifter, higher and is stronger through chemistry, you’d better get swifter, jump higher and get stronger yourself. When two cheaters compete, who wins?
Baseball, recovering from a debilitating strike in 1994, needed something to regain the public’s eye, and homeruns popping over fences seemed like just the ticket. All of a sudden, Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa are the greatest sluggers in baseball history, and both of them surpass Roger Maris, whose record had stood for three decades.
It turns out that not everyone was on the juice, but a whole lot of players were, and seems like everyone knew it except, if you believe their lies, the head honchos at Major League Baseball.
Those are the real culprits — the baseball owners and management, who knew their locker rooms were filled with the stuff, knew their players were juiced, knew that 73 homeruns in a season was just outrageous and that the muscle-bound freaks who trod the base paths didn’t get that way naturally. Yet they rewarded the chemically enhanced production with exorbitant salaries.
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