BASEBALL

BASEBALL

Baseball is our national pastime. A great game that time has not changed and does not effect. No watching of the time clock in one of these games...No sudden death playoffs...No dividing minutes into seconds and seconds into tenths of a second. A game lasts as long as it lasts. There are no penalties for taking too long to do something. Games still last 9 innings. The bases are still 90 feet apart and the pitcher's mound is still 60 feet 6 inches from home plate. You can't get an extra run for an extra long home run.

All this stability makes records important. Today's players compete with the players of a century ago for a spot in the record books. Everyone knows Babe Ruth hit sixty home runs in 1927. No one knows how many touchdowns Jim Brown scored in 1961 or how many baskets George Mikan scored in 1951. Without records, baseball wouldn't be near what it is today.

Baseball records are broken every year. Today's players are bigger, stronger, faster, smarter and it seems, have better drugs.

Now the evil eye of baseball is on Roger Clemens, the seven-time Cy Young award winner as the best pitcher of the year. An allegation is not necessarily a truth but he has been named by a fellow player as one who used illegal performance-enhancing drugs.

If we're not careful, baseball will lose the integrity of its records and the basis on which the game is built. Pete Rose is banned from baseball because what he did threatened the integrity of the game. As sure as Pete bet on baseball, awards taken and records eroded by players on performance-enhancing drugs have threatened the integrity of the game.

Baseball must bite the bullet and completely purge itself of this problem as quickly and efficiently as possible. I see no reason why those found guilty of using illegal drugs should be dealt with any less harshly than Pete Rose.