Cleaner game helps lift fans' clouds of doubt, By: Joseph A. Reaves
 
February 12, 2006, The Arizona Republic

Ah, spring training.

The grass is never greener; the baseballs never whiter.

The Cubs haven't choked and the Yankees haven't clinched.

Baseball is at its best in spring, when hope springs eternal.

This spring, though, is special.

This is the spring baseball is born again - the first spring in far too long when fans can watch the game in wonder instead of watching and wondering.

The steroids era is over. And while only the wildly naïve would believe for more than a minute that baseball is pure, no one can deny the game is cleansed.

"I'm proud of the fact we've moved forward," Commissioner Bud Selig said.

"We've cleaned it up and we've even dealt with amphetamines for the first time. Nobody can now say we didn't do anything about our problems."

No, nobody can now say.

And everybody is better because of it.

Still, the struggle continues.

Some time soon - maybe as early as the middle of April when the San Francisco Giants come to town - Barry Bonds, the perceived poster boy for the steroids era, will hit the 715th home run of his career, putting him one past Babe Ruth in second place on the all-time list.

When he does, Bonds will be steroids free. He's been steroids free for at least a year - or that's the assumption, anyway, since he was tested last season and his name never showed up alongside MLB's "Dirty Dozen" who proved positive for banned substances.

But nobody knows how many, if any, of his 708 home runs Bonds hit with the help of steroids. He never has publicly admitted he knowingly used steroids or any other performance-enhancing drugs. And chances are he never will.
Let history decide
So fans are left with two options:

• Wallow in a cosmos of presumably convincing circumstantial evidence and dismiss the historic achievements of a man who arguably is the greatest hitter in the history of the game with or without a magic cream or helpful needle,

or

• Forgive, forget and remember.

Forgive the transgressions, perceived or real. Forget the impact steroids may have had on the game for a relatively short while. And remember how great Bonds, and all of baseball, was before steroids. How great he and it are without steroids.

Guess which option the commissioner prefers?

"People can wonder what happened in the past," Selig said. "People have different views, but there is no empirical data that I know of.

"We need to be careful that we don't engage in a lot of innuendo. If this was politics, instead of baseball, I would call it McCarthyism."

Selig, an avid history buff who recently finished Doris Kearns Goodwin's epic on Abraham Lincoln, says time will tell how much of a shadow steroids will cast on the game.

"I can only deal with and clean up the present and the future," he said. "History will have to decide the rest.

"But one thing I can say is that at all times, no matter what, the overwhelmingly large, huge percentage of our players were doing nothing wrong and were being unfairly castigated."

Hmmm. Where's the empirical data for that?

True, only 5 to 7 percent of the major leaguers screened for banned substances a couple of seasons ago tested positive. But the tests then ignored a wide range of now-banned drugs, including the elusive human growth hormone and ever-pervasive amphetamines.

Still, the commissioner is right. Forget empirical data.
Heart trumps numbers
Sure, baseball is a game of numbers, of seemingly indisputable statistics that sway comfortably on any side of any argument to make any case.

But baseball is just as much, if not more, a game of the heart. And this spring the heart has had enough hurt.

Last spring, on that ugliest of St. Patrick's Days when Congress finally forced baseball to quit pretending and do something serious about steroids, Mark McGwire sullied a hero's hard-won reputation by refusing to face reality.

Wearing a green tie and red face, McGwire had the same answer time and again to any question about steroids: "I'm not here to talk about the past," he said, the hurt and embarrassment as real as anything in Washington since Lyndon Johnson lifted his beagles by the ears.

McGwire was vilified. And rightly so. That wasn't the moment, with a concerned nation watching and the future of baseball in the balance, for self-preservation. Nor was it the moment for finger-pointing lies.

It was time to face a wretched problem and fix it. Baseball has.

It's OK to talk about the past. Just don't let it ruin the now.

Baseball may not be pure but at least it's cleansed. Spring training is back. Play ball!