Another sad day in baseball
Kirby's gone and it was my sense that he was one of the "good guys." I'm going to cling to that, especially after reading about Barry Bonds in the recent Sports Illustrated. Thinking about baseball almost breaks my heart.

When I was younger, I used to collect baseball cards, read baseball books, and play baseball. My measly batting average was directly comparable to those guys in Royals stadium. Not the measly part necessarily, just the fact that we both had these numbers. Their numbers were printed on the backs of cards and could be compared to the greats of all time. Baseball is as much about what's on the paper and in peoples' memories as it is about what's going on now. It's the coolest statistics class ever. Yes. Cooler than Dr. Larry's. It has such a great and storied history. I don't even like to watch it anymore, but I can still appreciate the history- Dimaggio, Durocher, Gehrig, Ruth, Robinson, Reese, Kofax, Williams, and on and on. Great players that those players I used to watch aspired to be, and sometimes I aspired to be.

What's the point of aspiring to that on performance-enhancing drugs? Or worse for kids now aspiring to the numbers of the performance-enhanced? It's so sad. Sadder than my baseball career, even.

I was on a team called the Angels. It was my third team. My first team, Well's painting only won one game. I remember my coach from that team. He was a portly man. He had a good heart. Questionable taste in uniform colors, but a good heart. I liked baseball that year. My second year of baseball was with a team called Regal Plastics. We wore blue pin stripes. That team never won a game. I think I got to pitch a few times. I continued to hit poorly and play marginal defense. It wasn't a bad year. Then I joined the Angels. The Angels were good. Several of the team members would go on to high school sports stardom. We went something like 12-3 that year. I made a few nice catches in the outfield, but mostly I rode the bench. I ate sunflower seeds and talked with another David. He was a good friend that year, but I realized that baseball wasn't fun from the bench. I quit baseball after that. I figured that was pretty much it for me and sports. I was wrong about that, but baseball has never really gained a toehold again for me. Today doesn't help the poor game.