Letters to the Editor
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Division is good
I agree completely. Being able to block things out and watch a game with your kid is crucial.
Some people have a harder time doing it, though. They have to try harder to convince themselves that what they are watching is noble and pure. They are the sort who will go to a minor league game or a division III football game or a high school basketball game and rave to you about what you are missing. About the nobility of the pure players playing the game the way that it should be played.
They are right, of course, that those are good games. Then if they really follow a team and pay attention they will start to see things three dimensionally. They will notice places where the pure players on their team take cheapshot. Or they will find out that the coach is a divorced jerk. Or the star player doesn't go to class.
Real people are involved in sports. They are flawed, but it doesn't have to always be about that.
Sometimes you are just there to watch a game with your kid.
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Nothing to see here folks - move along.
Barry Bonds is not the only athlete accused/suspected of steroid use. Let's not forget those bicyclists who humiliated themselves recently. I wonder if you (Kaufman) and others like you are as worried about the other steroid-toting athletes, as you claim to be about Bonds. Hopefully, some other athlete(s) will come along who will arouse similar suspicions so that the obsession with Bonds can end and we can move on to the next guilty-until-proven-innocent jock.
If Mr. Bonds is guilty of committing a crime, try him, find him guilty and put him away. Otherwise, let's move on from this obsession with Bonds' alleged shortcomings and try to enjoy the great sport called baseball (something I have not been able to do for many years).
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Ring Ring Ring....
-"Hello?"
-"Hi, Salon, it's me, King. Here is today's column...."
Just messing with you, King. Everyone deserves a day off now and then.
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How I learned to stop worrying about Barry Bonds
I stopped reading bloviated hacks who think that sports are important enough to dedicate an adult life to.
It worked wonders.
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Spectacle of Major League Baseball!
A lot of fun every once in a while! But it's a long, hard sit on a plastic chair. Your Buster is a champ to get through it, and you are a champ to pull him all the way through that process.
Better baseball is on your horizon, King:
It will not be long before you get to watch Buster in hilarious, preposterous T-Ball games, where they do not even keep score. And, if you do not balloon up above 300 pounds, in a few years, you will have time to start playing softball again. Grown-up, incompetent softball, the White Man's Joy, my favorite activity with my pants on, and without a bowling ball in my right hand.
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Divided feelings: Not just for journalists
I think it's not just media types that are divided on Bonds, and all the other off-the-field issues. I think anyone who is a fan feels this division, worrying about the taint on the games we watch, but still wanting to just enjoy the baseball. I do think you media types are in a special position in that your opinions are so visible, so that there's more pressure to convey an appropriate sense of concern about the integrity of the game.
My way of not worrying, and enjoying the game, even when it involves Bonds, or Sammy Sosa, or the NFL's Shawne Merriman or some other known or suspected ne'er-do-well, is to think about the great ballplayers of the past whom I never got to see play. I never got so see Willie Mays, or Babe Ruth, or Stan Musial or any of many other great ballplayers, and I regret it: I would love to have seen DiMaggio running up his consecutive-games hit record, Ted Williams chasing the last .400+ season to date, Bob Gibson dominating the National League in 1968. So far as I know, these were all fine, upstanding men, but that has little if anything to do with why I'd like to have seen them play, and my regret at missing the great ballplayers of the past is not confined to the guys with sterling reputations.
I also regret never having seen Joe Jackson, and Eddie Cicotte and Ty Cobb, and Cap Anson, and any of the other deeply flawed greats of the past. Jackson conspired in throwing the 1919 World Series; Cicotte was even more central to the same scandal; Ty Cobb was by all reports a horse's rear and a racist, and was implicated in the game-throwing scandals of the nineteen teens; Anson was instrumental in establishing baseball's whites-only rule. All these men were, in addition, tremendous ballplayers, and if some time capsule appeared tomorrow with complete-game films of Joe Jackson in his prime--even Joe Jackson playing in the 1919 World Series--I'd be signing up at Amazon for the inevitable DVD release.
For that matter, while I never heard a bad thing about, for example, Musial, and would love to have video records of him playing in his prime, suppose some scandal broke tomorrow showing that he'd conspired with gamblers, or habitually cheated, or engaged in some other nefarious activity. It would change my opinion of Musial as a man, but he'd still be a great ballplayer, and I'd still want the mythical DVDs.
I didn't get to watch those players, and the game films don't exist, and the DVDs won't be coming up for sale on Amazon. But Barry Bonds is playing today, and it's a privilege to see such a great player in action. It would be a greater privilege if the steroid cloud weren't there, sure, but he was an all-time great before the presumed juicing (~1999), and he's a great player now. The fact that Skip Bayless, or Jay Mariotti, or some other high-minded journalist would prefer we fans spent more time denouncing Bonds and his fellow suspects is no reason for me to forget what a great ballplayer is, or how much I enjoy baseball at its best.
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Bad Business
Absurdly overpriced snacks, ball players who will do anything to get ahead. These are not unrelated.