Under the Street Light

Baseball is a game of records and bigger than life men. You want those records and men to mean something. Today's players are so tainted by the questions of performance enhancing drugs that comparing them to players of the past has been broken forever. The styles of play may differ decade to decade but in baseball you could always compare the Babe and his caree statistics with the player who was leading the home run race of any given year. That is what makes baseball different from other sports. Fans can compare generations of players. Barry Bonds is poised to surpass Babe Ruth on the games all time home run list but now Bonds has admitted he used steroids and performance enhancement substances to reach the point of breaking the Babe's record. Can the game ever redeem itself so that the first question out of a third graders mouth isn't about which superstar is on the juice, rather did he get a hit last night or how many homers does he have this season? My love for the game survived 8 work stoppages and the revelation by Pete Rose that he even bet on his own team! The last straw was when they cancelled the 1994 World Series because the players and owners could not come to an agreement over money issues. Even now when I read the newspaper and see that baseball takes up 4 pages of the sports section, I get mad. I long for the memories of baseball before it was tarnished. The memories under the neighborhood street light when all my buddies would gather each summer night. Some would walk and some would ride their bikes but someone always brought a radio so we could listen to the Colt 45's baseball game, the team latter changed their name to the Astros. They were the only team we could hear play on the radio but we could always get the scores of all the other games of the night. In 1961 Roger Maris was going for the Babe's record of 60 homers in a single season, a record that had stood since 1927. Maris hit 61 homers that year and we counted each and every one. Nights under the street light were special times, warm summer nights before I discovered girls, alcohol, drugs and all the other things that alter one's course in life. It would be nice to go back to those simple times but just like baseball things can never be the way they were. Even the street lights are not the same. In 1961 you could break the bulb of a street light with a rock and a good throw, now you need a 22 rifle to even make a dent in it's glow. It will always take more than a rock or 22 to dent the glow of memories from times spent under the neighborhood street light. Memories that are always bigger and better than they really were but who cares, they are still good memories.