I remember when I first fell in love with baseball. I was a kid back in 1987 when I found the Chicago Cubs playing on WGN.
Back in those days, there were no lights in Wrigley, so most of my summer afternoons were spent watching Andre Dawson and Ryan Sandberg swat baseballs over the ivy and into the bleachers.
As I grew up, I grew away from the game. They put up lights at Wrigley in ’89, pushing game time past my bedtime.
Then in ’94, they scrapped the whole season, including the World Series.
To make matters worse, winters spent watching Michael “Air” Jordan, Larry Bird and Magic Johnson made the grinding pace of baseball painful to me.
Then in 1998, I and millions like me fell in love with baseball again.
Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa lit up ballparks all over the country as they chased each other and history during a summer as magical as any of us had ever seen.
It gave all of us a piece of our childhood back.
On the humid summer night when McGwire hit that screaming rocket into the left field corner that put him past Roger Maris, millions of us watched as Big Mac rounded the bases, hugged his son and celebrated with Sosa.
When it was all said and done, McGwire had the record and, along with Sosa, had saved the game of baseball.
Perspective is a funny thing. Nearly seven years later, I look back at that moment that shimmered across my television screen all those years ago, and I see a cloud over the whole thing.
Come to find out, the All-American hero who muscled his way into the record books was most likely nothing but a second-rate cheater.
Even worse, the smiling right fielder who charmed America on his way to a runner-up finish in the home-run race is at best a world class idiot who could care less about his teammates.
At worst, Sosa may have been as big a cheater as McGwire.
It’s hard to find baseball on during the day anymore, but I did get to see many of my childhood heroes on TV last Thursday afternoon.
That’s when they sat in front of members of the U.S. Congress under oath.
One by one, Rafael Palmeiro, McGwire, Sosa, Jose Canseco and Curt Schilling fielded questions as Congress tried to determine whether or not baseball sold its soul to fill empty seats.
Later in the day, Bud Selig was in full damage control, stonewalling at every turn during his testimony while extolling the virtues of the league’s new drug testing policy.
Three days before the hearing, I had seen Selig holding a press conference in the wake of a news story linking McGwire to steroids.
He looked like a man in a room where all the walls were closing in as he slammed his fist on the table and said, “History will prove me right.”
Only time will tell, but if he’s wrong, history may be all that Selig and the game of baseball have left.

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