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Can't wait to read that book, BluesDuke.

And, frankly, I can't wait to sell it! ;)

Here's a question: Do you think the use of steroids has had anything to do with McQuire, Bonds, Sosa, etc. shattering Maris' single season home run record? If so, shouldn't there be an asterik beside their names?

In order, my answers are I don't know for dead solid certain (and neither, absent tangible and real rather than speculative evidence, does anyone else); and, absolutely not. You can make as much case that McGwire, Bonds, Sosa had in fact been constructing those bodies over long and consistent years (a case very much strengthened by the simple enough point that for at least three generations, now, baseball players could easily afford to spend the offseason working out, as opposed to working for a living, and they were speaking of such strength training and building for years long enough before Jose Canseco strolled into the league) as you could make the cynical case on the 'roids.

That doesn't mean steroids are not in wide-enough spread use in baseball; Ken Caminiti (a far more credible testament than Jose Canseco, who has had a long-enough time ax to grind) made that clear enough. So have the 80 percent of players polled recently (by USA Today, an easy enough poll to take if you figure there are only 550 or so major league baseball players) who said they favour testing for the 'roids (Curt Schilling has been merely the most vocal such advocate). But unless the evidence is brought in incontrovertibly, it is patently unwise and unfair to name a particular player.

And if you were to try to forge a judgment based on any statistical anomaly and on that alone, you would have to exhume Roger Maris for a test - of all the five men who have hit 60 or better even once in baseball history, Maris (not a huge man by the standards of physiology today - and, by the way, baseball players on the whole were becoming improved physical specimens over their forebears as soon as 1975-76 - but not necessarily Mr. Skinny, either, if you remember the famous shots of him hitting one out when wearing no sweatshirt under his Yankee uniform) actually had the biggest jump from his previous season's home run total. The problem does exist, but regarding a particular player it ought to be show the real evidence. And I think that time is coming sooner than we might expect - even if the leadership of the Players' Association continues insisting the steroid issue is merely a collective bargaining matter, they will find it increasingly untenable to hold that position when a firm enough majority of their clients want testing.

Now: Do I think there ought to be asterisks on McGwire/Bonds/Sosa if they turn out to have been doing the roids? No, no, a thousand times, no. For better or worse, baseball allowed the condition to exist in which the 'roids could have been indulged, and baseball's government turned a consistent and all-but-willful blind eye to the prospect. (One remembers when Thomas Boswell dropped the dime on Jose Canseco as far back as 1991 - it was Boswell who got semi-crucified for even thinking such a thing; no one dared question a guy whose glandular bombs were putting real or imagined asses in the seats.) And if that is the case, the asterisk question is as ridiculous as it was when Roger Maris busted the Babe. (And does anyone else aside from yours truly continue marveling at the hypocrisy of the Maris attackers in 1961, when nobody even though to suggest that, well, if Mr. Frick thinks it all ought to be nicked with an asterisk, then let's slap that asterisk on Sandy Koufax breaking the National League's single-season strikeout record…or Maury Wills breaking the single-season stolen base record a year later…Koufax merely broke Christy Mathewson; Wills merely broke Ty Cobb. Guess they weren't lucky enough to have Ford Frick as their ghostwriters.)

I find myself watching less and less a game I truly love.

The game itself is hardly diminished because the business that surrounds and presents it is a disgrace. The business that surrounds and presents baseball has been a disgrace since well enough before Babe Ruth popped 60 into the seats in 1927, the distinctions being that it was not much discussed in public the way we have done since the (just and appropriate) demise of the reserve clause. But the game has never been a disgrace. Even in the eras where baseball's government skewed toward an imbalance of power (the original live-ball era; the 1990s, to name two), the game itself seemed to have a way of overcoming.

This season, the game is not strictly a matter of power versus power - as many high-scoring games have come from passels and packs of running and slash-hitting as from the three-run bombs. The leading pitchers in each league this season seem to have earned run averages under four this season, with many of them going under three. At the All-Star break I counted at least twelve pitchers who, at that point, were on paper holding pace to be twenty-game winners. Twelve pitchers. (I couldn't name the last time there were twelve 20-game winners in the majors, either.) The pitchers are taking the inside part of the strike zone back, at least whenever they can conjugate this day's umpire's deviations. (You thought the Constitution has been rent by judicial licentiousness?) The hitters aren't all looking to go jack over the wall, though I noticed recently those who do mostly know how to do other kinds of hitting as well, and rather well at that. And if you want to look cynically, think of it this way: Sammy Sosa mostly has to hit all those bombs, because as often as not it's the primary way the Cubs get any runs on the board at all. ;)

And as much as I cringe at the thought of Bud Selig's innocence (this is, normally, something like speaking about political morality), if the All-Star Game's managers had managed their resources a little more prudently, not to mention paying attention to which of their pitchers were at what point of their normal scheduling (it turns out that, had their teams been on schedule rather than at the All-Star break that night, Philadelphia's Vicente Padilla and Seattle's Freddy Garcia would have taken their regular turns in the starting rotation), the All-Star Game would not have ended in a tie.

Well, at least we have the history of the game to fall back on and we have great people like you to bring us that history. Thanks.

That's a very pleasant thought, of course. But for better or worse baseball's history is not always or strictly as wonderful or romantic as us sentimentalists would like it to believe. At the minimum, our ignorance has been anything but bliss. And, as wonderful as baseball's history has been, there has been a corollary side effect, to which I alluded somewhat in my piece: a prejudice has hold, still, that in any sport you are allowed to talk about its greatest practitioners and draw them from the modern or contemporary play of it…except baseball. Suggest even quietly that Alex Rodriguez, for example, may yet prove to be the greatest baseball player of all, and as often as not you get jumped by the crowd who cannot abide suggestions than anyone beyond a Ruth, a Cobb, or a DiMaggio, or a Speaker, had the Right Stuff. (By the way, if I had to make the absolute choice between the two, I'd pick DiMaggio over Ruth: Ruth's Yankees didn't win as many pennants and World Series with him as DiMaggio's did with him. And Ruth's teams never said of him what DiMaggio's said of him: that with him they always felt like they had the chance to win.)

It is as if surpassing those men in terms of performance achievement could possibly eliminate them as icons of the game, and this is patently not true. You could line up ten players who will make Babe Ruth look less valuable to his teams than they, but you could never eliminate the image of Babe Ruth, the standing of Babe Ruth, in the firmament of the game. Not even if you come up with a player who obliterates Ruth's offencive statistics (defencively, he was at best an average outfielder; other than his slugging averages and on base percentages, he was at best a barely average baserunner and as a basestealer he should have been arrested for stealing runs from his teams) completely would you obliterate Babe Ruth, period.