In August of 1975 I made a trip from Chicago to Milwaukee for a game between the Brewers and the Texas Rangers. According to baseball-almanac.com, the Brewers won the game 7-4, defeating ex-Cub Bill Hands in his final major league appearance. I was one of only 13,893 who paid to get in that day. The Brewers came into the game with a record of 54-62, and the Rangers were a game better at 55-61.
Being a Cubs fan, it’s a safe bet that I didn’t make the 90-mile trek to County Stadium to see the Brewers play the Rangers in a meaningless game. No, I was there for a specific reason, and that was to see Henry Aaron. Somehow in all of my trips to Wrigley Field up to that point, I had never seen Aaron play. I know I must have seen the Cubs play the Braves at least once, but it must have been on an Aaron day off. Knowing that 1975 could be Aaron’s last year, I took the opportunity in the penultimate month of the season (it still ended in September back then) to make sure that I could tell my grandchildren that I had seen Aaron play.
Aaron hadn’t played the day before, so I thought it would be a good bet that he’d be in the lineup for the Sunday contest I attended. I was right; Aaron was the DH and went 0-for-2. The highlight of the game was Ranger manager Frank Lucchesi getting into a highly-animated, hat-tossing, dirt-kicking argument after being ejected by the home plate umpire, but I went home happy having finally seen the home run king at work.
Now fast-forward to 1999 and what was supposed to be the final year for County Stadium (its demise was delayed for a year after a crane accident during construction of Miller Park). Now living in Kenosha, I made another trip to the old ball park, this time with my son, to see the Brewers play the Cardinals. The reason for the trip was pretty much the same as it had been 24 years before; I hadn’t had a chance to see Mark McGwire play, and I wanted my son to have the opportunity to tell his grandchildren he had seen the reigning single-season home run champ in action. The highlight of the evening was watching McGwire take batting practice. He stood loosely in the box and took seemingly effortless, go-to-hell swings, several of which launched the ball into titanic parabolas that terminated behind the bleachers in left field. That alone was worth the price of admission.
Now fast-forward once more, to last month’s steroids hearing in Washington. Before the players testified before the congressional committee, Donald Hooton, an angry father whose teenaged son had committed suicide after using steroids, pointed at McGwire, Sammy Sosa, Jose Canseco and Rafael Palmeiro and said, “Players who are guilty of taking steroids are not only cheaters, you are cowards.”
I thought about that trip to Milwaukee in 1975, and the one in 1999. No one ever called Hammerin’ Hank a coward. He hit his home runs without benefit of performance-enhancing, illegal drugs over the course of a 23-year career, and without ever hitting 50 homers in a season. Aaron got his home runs the old-fashioned way—he earned them—every last one.
It made me sick to watch McGwire snivel his non-answers to the committee and not have the courage to stand up and admit what everyone with a brain knows is the truth. And we now have Barry Bonds on the cusp of eclipsing Aaron’s career homers record, and Bonds has denied knowingly taking steroids, allowing for the possibility, I guess, that extraterrestrials entered his room in the night and injected him as he slept.
I suppose Major League Baseball gave us what we wanted by failing to do something about steroid use before things got out of hand. There’s little doubt that I would not have been in the ball park in Milwaukee on that day in 1999 had it not been for McGwire’s previous “heroics.” For the weekend when I attended, the Brewers drew some 77,000 fans. The previous weekend, when they were playing the McGwire-less San Diego Padres, the attendance was 53,000, so I guess I wasn’t alone--do the math, as they say.
In the minds of most baseball fans, it won’t matter much if or when Bonds breaks Aaron’s record, or that McGwire, Sosa and Bonds all broke Roger Maris’s single-season mark. Aaron and Maris achieved what they did on pure guts natural adrenaline and native ability, and no one has ever questioned it. McGwire, Bonds and Sosa will go to their graves with huge black asterisks hanging over their heads, even if there are none in the record books.