61!

As I recall it was a Friday. It was a warm spring afternoon in Tucson. The year was 1961.

I was fifteen years old and I had just left the classroom and frantically made my way through the corridor at my high school. I rushed out the front of the building and headed for the gymnasium. The names had already been posted on a piece of paper and the list of players who had made the varsity baseball team were taped to the wall for all the world to see. I came to a halt as a dozen guys dispersed, giving me plenty of room to saunter up to read the board.

The names were in alphabetical order. I went right to the P's. My name wasn't there. It was devastating. Luckily, as I grew older, there would be plenty of teams and plenty of baseball for me. But that particular afternoon, I thought my baseball playing days were over. I was down in the dumps for sure, but all it took to get me out of my doldrums and give baseball another try was the M and M Boys, Roger Maris and Mickey Mantle. Three months later, school was out and a long came the lazy days of summer. It was the summer of '61 and the race was on to break Babe Ruth's long-standing, single-season record of 60 home runs. And, on October 1, 1961, it happened, as Maris ripped number 61 in a game against the Boston Red Sox at Yankee Stadium.

Two years later, on October 1, 1963, another slugger was born in Pomona, California. His name: Mark McGwire. McGwire, of course, rose to stardom in the major leagues, and, at the age of 35, crushed a home run over the left field fence in St. Louis for his 62nd homer of the 1998 season to break the record held by Maris for 37 years. The Maris family stood up and watched McGwire's blast sail through the air. And now here we are in 2010 and McGwire has just released to the world, what most baseball fans already surmised: he had taken steroids during his career -- and more importantly, he had taken them during that same period of time when he broke the single-season record.

The Maris family had a hard time getting a handle on McGwire's crushing blow in 1998 and now, 12 years later, they'll have a hard time grasping this latest blow to Roger's legacy and to the sport of baseball in general. As for me, I still love the game as much as I did as a young boy who had just had his heart broken when he failed to make the high school team. I've grown up a lot since then. I still love the game of baseball, despite the damage to the game caused by Mark McGwire, Jose Conseco, and others. Baseball will survive, it always has.