For decades, this was one of my most favorite times of the year when major league baseball teams had their pitchers and catchers report for spring training in preparation for the longest season of any professional sport (not counting mumblety-peg). This year character witnesses and those without alibis will be reporting on separate dates I suppose.
This past off-season, the Houston Astros and the Boston Red Sox did a pretty good job of replacing that pot of gold fans look forward to at the end of the winter pause rainbow with a fifty-five-gallon drum of excrement, not that the rest of Major League Baseball didn't help by deciding that old adage 'cheaters never prosper' needed to go the way of high-top sneakers seemingly.
One hundred years ago, baseball had the Black Sox Scandal and from what I've read no one made the Cincinnati Reds surrender their World Series title so it would seem those trophies in Houston and Boston are safe. For now.
There's a corollary to (attributed to) Richard Petty's quote "if you ain't cheatin' you ain't tryin'," that goes "and if you get caught, you didn't try hard enough." This sixty-eight-year-old man who becomes a seven-year-old again when spring training starts would prefer to not have his baseball players and teams try quite so hard.
Every day proves there's less and less in my country worth believing in. Please don't force me to add baseball to that list.
-bill kenny
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