Mark Gilroy

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Dog Days of Summer: How I Lost That Loving Feeling for Baseball

Too many strikes, too much free agency - baseball is dead to me.

I have fallen out of love with baseball.

Yes, the dog days of summer are here. That means basketball, a winter sport indigenous to the U.S., is just starting their championship series. And that hockey, another winter sport, but this one transplanted to frigid regions of the U.S. like Phoenix, Dallas, Atlanta, and LA, just crowned a new champion. But as the seconds tick off on the NBA Series between the Lakers and the Celtics, what it really means is that we’re officially entering the dead period before football season starts.

Some sports purists just sat up a little straighter. Say what? Don’t you know it’s baseball season!

True. Baseball is still America’s pastime, particularly if you live in Boston or NYC and can outspend the rest of the league (combined) in the quest for tactical superiority and garnering every spot on the All Star team. But football is America’s passion. And so for the rest of us, excluding St. Louis fans who support their Cards no matter what, Chicago some years (or for certain proud masochistic Cubs fans, every year), and one Cinderella-story elsewhere in America, we just don’t care. Sure, we’ll watch a game or two before the season is over, but the second game depends on whether women’s bowling or billiards (or some combination of those two sports) is in reruns yet.

Just for context, I didn’t grow up with anything but love for baseball. I was born in Dayton, Ohio, about 45 miles north of Cincinnati, and was there when the Big Red Machine terrorized opposing pitchers. (My rookie year as a 5-year-old fan at old Crosley Field was Pete Rose’s rookie year as a player.) I was in Kansas City for most of the George Brett era and attended a minimum of 20-something games a year.

But something happened. It’s not just that the clubs I like started losing. You expect success to be cyclical in sports, unless you’re a Cubs fan, of course. (Sorry for that second gratuitous shot at the Cubbies in one article.) With the explosion of free agency, I discovered I didn’t know half the guys on “my team” from one season to the next. I could have lived with some rebuilding years with a young exciting roster of “our guys”, but once-proud franchises like the Royals and Reds became development squads for the deep pocketed coastal teams. Throw in a couple of strikes, including one that accomplished something that not even Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany could pull off – shutting down a World Series – and I was gone as a fan. I think forever.

So you’re pretty mad at baseball? You probably think I’m a hater. Nope. The problem is not that I got mad at baseball but that I simply stopped caring a decade ago. And despite publicity gimmicks like the Red Sox winning the World Series and biannual Congressional Steroids hearings, I’ve lost that loving feeling.

It might be Kevin Garnett with a follow up monster jam or Kobe Bryant with an acrobatic mid-air spin move with a reverse lay up that ends the NBA Finals. But whoever does it sometime in the next 10 days or so, all I can say is it’s almost time for football!

Who Framed Roger Clemens?

Life is 10% what happens to you and 90% how you respond to it. So they say. But are they right? There’s undoubtedly enough anecdotal evidence of those who have overcome hardships and tragedies with faith, optimism, and resilience — and conversely, enough examples of those who squandered advantages, blessings, and favor through pessimism, lack of discipline, and feelings of entitlement – to suggest yes, “they” are probably right. To some degree or another.

There’s a parallel theorem that’s back in the news.

Outside of murdering your wife while wearing a new pair of Aris Isotoner Light gloves (if the gloves are too small, don’t wear them at all), your opportunity to rehabilitate a damaged reputation is 10% what you’ve done in the first place and 90% how you own up to it.

Don’t hold me to that exact ratio but if you don’t believe there’s at least some truth to it, just ask Richard Nixon how effective cover ups are when you’ve obviously broken the rules – and get caught. Bill Clinton looked us right in the eyes, wagged a finger in our direction, and declared, “I did not have …” in his attempt to follow in Nixon’s presidential footsteps. Consumed by arguments of the definition of “is,” his presidency was never the same even if he wasn’t removed from office following his impeachment.

Maybe Roger Clemens never took steroids and was amazingly unaware that others around him, including his colleagues and wife, were doing so. But if he did, his legacy will be tarnished more by his theatrical declarations of innocence than anything he did in an era of baseball when it is estimated that at least two-thirds of Major League Baseball was ingesting some kind of performance enhancer. So who framed Roger Clemens? If he’s found guilty … just ask him!

POSTSCRIPT: He was found guilty and his reputation seems to be permanently damaged.