Back in the late 1800s and early 1900s — the so-called “dead ball era” — the game played the way it was meant to be played. It was a stategy game, as opposed to brute force (much like war, but you’d never know that by Bobby Lee; but I digress). The boys played “small ball,” one that relied more on stolen bases and hit-and-run type plays than on home runs. A premium was placed on speed, and low-power hits like the Baltimore Chop, developed in the 1890s by the Baltimore Orioles, were used to get on base. Once on base, a runner would often steal or be bunted over to second base and move to third base or score on a hit and run play. In no other era have teams stolen as many bases as in the dead-ball era.

But you in the Present have loused it up. You’ve juiced up the ball so that journeyman like Ray Durham are feared in ways that, in the past, were reserved for the likes of Ruth and Gehrig. And players cheat by injecting themselves with illegal drugs to bulk up, in the hopes of titillating the Fans of the Present with a home run. Pathetic. I can wait til my time in your accured Present is over.

We’ll get through this era. These greedheads may have destroyed the mystique of the home run and tarnished multiple records but even they can’t destroy the game. It’s bigger than all of us.

He is grey and round and old. He is there 5 days a week. He sits by himself for most of the day, watching CNN or ESPN on the TV they put in for him.

Occasionally some 40-something dad with a pre-teen son will stop and talk about the time he saw Pete in the middle of his 44-game hit streak back in 1978, or how as a 10-year old he bumped into him in a Holiday Inn breakfast room in San Diego and got him to sign the placemat. The guy buys his kid a ball and walks off talking about Ty Cobb and 4000 hits and running to first base on walks.

The guy sitting at that plastic table was my hero. I used to pore over the box scores for his line. Back before MLB.com or Direct TV I used to count the hours until Tony Kubek and Joe Gariogiola would show the Big Red Machine on the one game a week that was on television. My dad let me stay home from school to watch him in playoff games when they were still played during the day.

Now that same guy sits in shopping mall hawking his autograph.

Maybe that is as it should be. Maybe gambling is the worst sin in the baseball religion.

But I’ll be damned if I feel that way right now. Because I was in my 20′s when Rose fell from grace. I could handle it (better than I can handle Field of Dreams, that’s for sure). Today, though, I have to go home after work and explain this to 2 nine-year old boys.

I don’t care if Bonds or McGwire or A-Rod end up in the Hall. Keeping them out wouldn’t be close to justice. The only justice would be to see the juicers — 20 years on — paying the rent by pushing signed 8x10s. That would be justice — because I would happily take my grandkids to go see them, point at them, and tell them why.