Ryan Braun!!
Ryan Braun is an outfielder for the Milwaukee Brewers of major league baseball’s national league. He has been a premier player for several years and has won the league’s most valuable player award. He is also a drug cheat who, this week, was suspended for the rest of the season due to his admission, finally, that he used performance enhancing drugs.
Last year Mr. Braun denied using these drugs and impugned the reputation of a reliable drug collector for major league baseball, thereby avoiding a fifty game suspension to start the season. This year he has, by his agreeing to the suspension previously mentioned, validated every lie that he told previously to everyone that he lied to.
The older one gets, the tougher it is to live the lie.
We have been watching and listening to major league baseball for fifty years come September of this year and we have watched all sorts of characters come and go through the course of those years. We have seen the flamboyant ones and the quiet ones who just went about their business and did their jobs with the God given talent that they have been blessed with. And, make no mistake about it, to be blessed with those talents is a gift all unto itself. And, at the end of that road for some, the select few, lies a place called Cooperstown, New York, where the Baseball Hall of Fame resides. Of all of the major sports in America, there is no place like it at all. The heroes of Valhalla reside in Cooperstown and those who guard its entrance do so with a great deal of ferocity. It has been said that once you become a major league baseball player you will compete against the best at your craft for the rest of your career. And then most will spend the rest of their lives either further involved in baseball or remembering their time there. It has been said by so many baseball players that you cannot fully appreciate your career until its final chapter is written. There are many aging men who sit around today across this nation wondering why they did not get into Cooperstown, the standards are so exacting. There are men who have gone to their graves who would have given just about anything to be included in that group and to have seen it happen before they died. And then you have the Ryan Braun’s of this world who might have had the talent to get there without drugs who just piss it all away to gain some extra measure of advantage over their fellow players.
Maybe it’s the money that sets them apart from their fellows these days. Over the sixty five games that Ryan Braun will sit out this year, he will lose around three million dollars. The immortal Babe Ruth, perhaps the greatest pure player in the game’s history, never made three million dollars in his entire career. We have a fairly pedestrian former major league pitcher living in southern Illinois who built a nice mini mansion here who claimed justifiably so that he made twenty six million dollars pitching major league baseball over his career and he was really just a bit above average for the game and has been out of it for several years. Cooperstown never called to him and he understood that but he is set for life anyway. It is sometimes just a pleasure and a distinct privilege to play on the same field with those who will someday take their place among the greats in rural New York state.
When we think about greatness, true greatness, in baseball today, we think of people like the former St. Louis Cardinal Albert Pujols, who now toils away for the Los Angeles Angels in his thirteen year in the majors. When Pujols took a ten year deal with the California team, he could confidently look them in the eye and tell them that he had never used drugs. Pujols plays for a lot of money each and every year and there are those who comment that he may be in his declining years, but, still yet, he had never used drugs. Pujols had earned his way into Cooperstown before he had ever left St. Louis in his eleven years there and what he does in California is just a bonus. Pujols could possibly prolong his career by drug use and perhaps jack his already impressive numbers a bit but he will not do it and that is what makes him deserving of Cooperstown. Albert Pujols realizes that there is far more to this life than just money and fleeting fame on the ball field and he seeks the lasting fame that only good morals can bring to him. Baseball just lost perhaps its greatest ambassador when Stan Musial died in January of this year and Musial probably did more good off of the ball field than he ever did on it throughout the fifty years that he spend after his illustrious career had ended. Baseball is about far more than the sport, it is about leading an exemplary life and being a role model to others who desperately need that so.
There are things that money will not buy and admission to Cooperstown is one of them. And people like Ryan Braun, after their drug stained careers are over, may sit idly by and increasingly wonder why they did the things that they did as they are lumped in with those who have forever stained one of the purest sports that has ever existed on this earth. To play or just to watch the summer game is a gift and a privilege and a pure joy to the heart and mine grieves every time that I think of people who lessen those who have given so much to so many over the years that this sport and this nation have been married together. There is a child inside all of us, regardless of our age, and one can look at a ninety year old man and see in his eyes the child who has watched baseball since they were ten. To dirty that is an affront to that which made us all and has given us so much to be thankful for.
IOVHO,
Regards,
Joe
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