In Babe Ruth’s final public appearance in 1948 – with Ruth ravaged to the bone by cancer, pushing words through a body that no longer wanted to hang around or do anything – the great Sultan of Swat turned into a kind of Nostradamus for a sold-out cheering crowd in Yankee Stadium.  Baseball is a great game, he told the crowd in a quivering voice, through amplifiers filling the stadium, BUT only as long as we remember that baseball must serve America’s children first.

I have long felt that athletes who achieve at the level of a Babe Ruth or a Muhammad Ali are among the world’s rare geniuses, that they are open to certain insights the rest of us even with our highest educations have never earned.  So I have for years come back to Ruth’s final public statement feeling that there was some hidden subtext in it that someday would open up in a very startling style, like an ancient egg that suddenly hatches in a natural history museum.

I think that in this major league season that is opening now, I finally understand what Babe Ruth’s warning to us really was all about. It means that in this era where the top major league baseball players are almost uniformly using steroids, it is up to us parents to save our children from baseball’s powerful steroid promotion.  We need to start replacing major league baseball now with something better, just as we have retired other popular athletic games – like rounders – in past American history for when better choices came to our attention.

Remember, this is the baseball season that opens following the Senator George Mitchell report on steroid use.  Nothing like this has happened since the 1920 major league baseball season opened after Chicago Black Sox fixed-world-series scandal of 1919.

At the eye of this hurricane stands the towering figure of Barry Bonds, the former San Francisco Giant right fielder who last year became the first major league player since Ruth to hold both the  career and single-season major-league home run records.  I have written about Bonds in this website this past summer in a generally sympathetic way, as can be seen from my archives.  My motive is that Bonds is probably the main reason we are now finally fighting back against the sinister steroid culture.

A few years ago, after Mark McGuire of the St. Louis Cardinals broke the single-season home run record, the California’s state education system made such a hero of McGuire that a children’s book telling young elementary school students to be like Mark McGuire was circulated in classrooms.  In my rounds in public education I found this celebration of Mark McGuire even being taught in one school in the Lancaster School District.  What is even more remarkable was that McGuire was actually seen taking steroids in his locker room during his home-run record season.

In contrast, Barry Bonds created no such public following during his home-run seasons.  In fact, he was the first baseball player to really make the appearance of steroids universally ugly.  In a way, he reminds me of the contribution that Richard Nixon made to America, compared to what Bill Clinton did to our country.

Nixon had a talent for making bad things even uglier than they were.  When he committed perjury on a deposition, the country drove him out of office, and in effect we even drove his successor out of officer after Gerald Ford pardoned him.

Clinton did the same lying and perjury on a deposition as Nixon.  However, in contrast to Nixon, Clinton made breaking the law look cute and cuddly.  In a similar vein, Mark McGuire lending himself to children’s books and Sammy Sosa sitting next to Hillary Clinton at a State of the Union address have made the steroid era look cute — and too cuddly – as well.

In contrast, Bonds and Nixon with their refusal to kiss up to anyone have made breaking the law look ugly, as it should look.  For that, I think that America owes a degree of thanks to both Richard Nixon and the Barry Bonds.

And now there is talk about putting Bonds in prison so we can put the steroid scandal behind us and go on with this year’s starting lineups. I’m okay with that, as long as it helps our children and makes steroids less attractive.  But since the only reason Bonds qualifies for indictment is a perjury charge, we need also teach our children that that justice must be consistent by putting Bill Clinton in prison for his perjury problems as well.

Meanwhile, baseball is reeling under the direction of what certainly is the weakest and most owner-owned commissioner in major league baseball history – Bud Selig.  In contrast, after the scandal of 1919, major league baseball was saved only because of the independence and resolution of one of the strongest baseball commissioners in history, Judge Kennesaw Mountain Landis.

It may look as if nothing much is changed in baseball, but serious parents were shocked to find that former Senator Mitchell in his report found that almost half of baseball’s major league all stars have had their performances assisted by steroids.  It is telling these baseball parents that the only way their children can assuredly become baseball stars is by ruining and mutating them with drugs.

We’re darned lucky to have a backup in soccer

I am now making the choice that seems to be an inevitable decision for any sports-minded American parents.  I am giving up interest in baseball and learning much more about soccer.

I see now that soccer is assuredly for any boy a more manly game than baseball with major league baseball’s steroid culture. Basically, steroids redistributes male hormones into other parts of the body away from where they should be, which may be why the voices of hulking baseball players like Barry Bonds and Roger Clemons have now made them sound like Marilyn Monroe.

Generally, comparing soccer and baseball is like comparing war with chess.  Soccer is a game of motion – like war, but without the killing part.  Baseball largely turns children into standing chess pieces that – in contrast with soccer – is interrupted by action rather than fueled by action.

Other nations in the world have for many years experienced national fervor over their soccer teams, but America has never once had that feeling of being “king of the world” because baseball has always stood between us and world soccer.  That has changed at least in my priorities.  I am now following world soccer.

And since this is the Internet and it doesn’t cost anything to use more space, I am free here to say thank you to the dedicated staff at the Santa Clarita Soccer Center, including Scott Shauer, Derek Stradley, Greg Juksch. Jabber Hadda and Amanda Allegra.  And yes, thank you, all you soccer moms in the West Ranch and throughout the valley – you know who you are.

Chris Sharp                                                                                                                            Commentary

Chris Sharp is an Educator and a prize-winning professional writer. His commentaries represent his own opinions and not necessarily the views of any organization he may be affiliated with or those of the West Ranch Beacon.