Stop Pissing on my Game
This has been looooooooooong overdue, and it probably won’t be the last time I talk about this. I grew up in an extremely sports heavy environment. My dad was an incredible athlete, and, if you travel to a tiny town just north of Louisville, Ky, you may still hear of his sporting exploits. My mom was a tremendous athlete as well, and I often heard stories of her being the all-time quarterback during saturday afternoon football games, because she threw better than the boys. She also was the only girl allowed to run track at her Catholic school. My brother was and is still considered by me to be the best defensive second baseman I’ve ever seen, not named Sandberg of course.
Our family sport growing up was baseball. That was the sport of choice that trumped all else. It was also my best sport growing up. After all, there ain’t much room for a 6′1” white boy with limited hops who plays in the post. (Although, nobody out boarded me in high school.)
I was taught at a very early age that when you play the game, you play it the right way. You play hard no matter what. You run the bases and you always get dirty. You go after every ball you can with reckless abandon. I adopted the motto growing up that “if you aren’t dirty, bleeding, or both, you didn’t play well.” I went through a wooden dugout fence at 16. I busted my knee open multiple times getting it stuck under a chain link fence sliding for pop fouls. I learned to do the splits at first base, so that I could stretch farther for every throw that was made. I ate dirt, no really, I seriously did. I talked to my bat, and treated it like a person. Whenever I got a new baseball glove, it was like a gift from the Heavens. I kept it under my pillow at night. Baseball was my love and my passion.
That all changed when I got to college. The game changed. It was all about homeruns. We played games with scores that were so high, USC’s football team couldn’t have outscored our games. The MLB changed too. It also adopted the homerun game. Nobody, on any level played defense. Nobody knew how to run the bases. The appreciation for a beautiful slide around a tag-when-the-throw-already-beat-you was gone. Steroids became the Big League Chew/sunflower seed/chaw of the 90’s. If you weren’t doing it, you weren’t trying hard enough.
There’s a reason baseball is now #3 in my heart. The beauty and passion of the game is gone. I’m calling out all players on this one, and I’m starting with Raffy Palmiero. He had such a beautiful swing. It was a work of art. He was no Will Clark, Eddie Murray or George Brett, but in my heart, nobody was. After his denials at the Congressional Hearing, I thought, maybe his game was real. He loved baseball too much to cheat on it. But now, he’s tested positive for some heavy stuff. I was trying to love baseball again, and then this happened after he hit 500 homers and 3,000 hits. But the positive test was before hit 3,000.
I watched the Hawk and Ryno every day during the summertime. I was overjoyed when Will Clark or Fred McGriff were on the Saturday telecasts or ESPN Sunday Night Games. I stayed up waaaay past my bedtime every night to catch Baseball Tonight (arguably the greatest television show of my childhood). The Orioles were fighting for first six weeks ago, and I was loving the game again. Now I can’t bear to go through 734 - 744 on the DirecTV Extra Innings Package.
During Ryno’s acceptance speech, he talked about respect for the game. He talked of the importance of knowing how to bunt, run the bases, turn a double-play. He talked about everything that mattered to the little boy in my heart that still thinks he could have played big league ball if he had the right opportunities, if someone could have seen the ecstacy he felt every time he put on a glove and cap.
STOP PISSING ON MY GAME. STOP KILLING A CHILDHOOD THAT WAS SO GREAT.
