On the other side of the dial, the snickering from Boston was audible all the way in Sout
h Windsor. Good ol' Slappy McBluelips. When it comes to schadenfreude, A-Fraud through in the clutch every time.But every time today I felt a smile start to cross my face, every time I allowed delicious irony of the failed 2003 trade to start sinking in, I felt a shudder. This is not a story to celebrate, not for baseball and not for the Red Sox that now exist only in our mythology.
Karma is a bitch and no Red Sox deed has ever really gone unpunished. There isn't a Red Sox fan alive, at least among those being honest with themselves, who doesn't allow for not just the possibility, but the probability, that at least one of its 2004 heroes met the same fate in the 2003 testing sweep.
A positive test against some '04 players, like fringemen Curtis Leskanic or Pokey Reese, probably wouldn't be enough to sully the otherwise bullet-proof memory of that October. But what if it was Trot Nixon, always voted Most Likely, or Kevin Millar, or even -- current status notwithstanding -- Game 7 hero Johnny Damon?
What if it was Ortiz? Or Mueller? Or Lowe?
What then would we think of the Steal and the Sock and the Sweep? Would it remain untainted? Could it? Should it?
That is one conundrum I admit having no stomach for. I waited too long and invested too much in that eight-game span to have it even so much as smudged by this scandal. So I read and I watch and I listen as A-Rod's tale unfolds. But I do not celebrate. I do not gloat. I will not wish onto another what I would never wish for myself.
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Of course there are bosox who were dirty.
ReplyDeleteHowever we fans aren't not logical.
We'll gloat and laugh about the Yankee turmoil until the other shoe drops.
Who knows?
Maybe it won't.
Well said, sir.
ReplyDeleteI see the whole steroid era as a piece-Babe Ruth didn't face all the best pitchers, and Ty Cobb hit a ball that was more akin to a rolled up sock than a baseball, and so on, and so on. This whole era is suspect, but all of baseball history was played under different conditions.
And so it goes.