Wandering Thoughts

It has been a weird couple of days. Normally, I can't wait to read my favorite on-line sport entities (do people still buy sport magazines in print?). The last two days have been difficult to pull the trigger and go to my familiar haunts. How many more painful stories and analysis will there be today? Who will admit what and who will deny anything and everything. Pettitte came clean, which is good...I guess.

For long-time baseball fans, our game is rooted in our psychology. The memories of the past are part of the fabric of being a human and a Fan today. We naturally compare batting stances to those registered in our memory banks. We remember when today's currently good teams were bad and vice-versa. And, for many of us, we compare statistics of today's players to those we watched and treasured in the past.

Today we find that only two out of the three are sort of the same. So it is, in this post Mitchell haze, that I note the Edmonds trade--which should only help the Cardinals, by the way--without bothering to check his stats for the past few years. That's really odd for me.

But doggonit, I'm not going to give up a lifetime of passion for all of the ugly truth that was revealed, or at least revealed by the pond scum that Mitchell interviewed. Babe Ruth is given credit for saving the game after the Black Sox scandal, but though he did help with his Herculean feats, it was the fans who loved the game enough to keep coming and supporting it. Many who read about the game fixing and the gambling knew that the White Sox players from that infamous team were the only ones from that era who got caught. Many more got away with it and isn't that a parallel to what happened with Mitchell's report?

Nobody should consider Jose Canseco any kind of hero. He is the worst kind of spectator of this whole mess. Not only was he the cheerleader (and in many cases, the ringleader), but then he made a few million more writing about it when he was finished making millions by cheating. But even so, we all know deep inside that he is right that this report was a joke. A handful of players were indicted by hearsay while dozens more got away with their mischief. We know he's right. We just hate he is because of who he is. Can we believe A-Rod's denial? Should we? Does it even matter any more?

The scandal will pass and it will be a milestone looked back upon darkly, much like the "Say it ain't so, Joe." But, the bottom line is that, as much as it sounds like simplistic thinking, we fans are going to start reading our stats again and focusing on the hot rookies, the comeback players and which team will be this year's surprise. I may be an idiot, but this is my game and it has been for decades. I'm not throwing it away with all the other empty syringes.