Basebrawl

Say, that was one heck of a thunderstorm the other night, eh?

It's come to a point in what some call the "national conversation" that the only safe topic to discuss is the weather. I've learned to keep my trap shut about politics with casual acquaintances, since even the most benign comment praising George W. Bush can unleash a tiring tirade about the Republican Party representing fascism, racism, McCarthyism, Nazism, imbecility, obesity and God (oops, sorry about that) knows what else.

But you'd think a couple of guys talking about baseball wouldn't spark much rancor. Still, there I was last Saturday, at the opening ceremony for the Roland Park Little League season in north Baltimore, chatting with a nice fellow while raffle tickets were picked out of a hat on a stage festooned with bunting. We both agreed it was swell that almost all the kids on the field, at the sound of "The Star-Spangled Banner," instinctively took their caps off and placed right hand to heart, but a few minutes later the controversy over steroids was introduced by one of us.

I suggested, in what seemed like small talk as the first strong sun of the spring burned my face, that Barry Bonds, despite his creepy media image, wasn't in the same league as Michael Jackson, Elliot Spitzer, O.J. Simpson or Sirhan Sirhan. My companion, while polite, gave an impromptu lecture on the sanctity of baseball statistics and that Bonds not only ought to be banned from the game, but his entire record of on-field accomplishments must, for the sake of the children, be erased. And don't even mention the Hall of Fame. Oddly enough, when the inferior Mark McGwire's name was brought up, he said that was a "sad" moment.

It was a fruitless gum-flap. I said the '94 baseball strike was a worse scandal than steroids, he countered that Bonds and Jason Giambi were cheaters. My seemingly innocuous contention that pre-integration Hall of Famers had a statistical edge over today's stars, not to mention amphetamine-popping athletes in the 60s, fell on deaf ears. Steroids have ruined baseball was the constant rebuttal. I mentioned that the hubbub hasn't hurt attendance at MLB stadiums one bit, and he said that was a function of big business.

I didn't bother bringing up Michael Gee's excellent column on the subject in the Boston Herald's April 1 edition. Gee simply decimated baseball's pious fans, first by dismissing those who turned up their noses at Johnny Damon's probably very dumb book (I haven't read it), in which he chronicles unsavory off-field behavior.

Gee wrote: "One element of baseball impossible to understand is how many folks are always saying the sport has shattered their illusions. How'd they get such illusions in the first place?" He goes on to say that as a child his favorite ballplayer was arrested for indecent exposure, but that incident, while shocking to an eight-year-old, served as a lesson that athletes aren't role models. "Without its strain of rowdy goofiness, baseball would be insufferable, fit only for the Ken Burns of the world."

And the Gee really piles on: "What is Barry Bonds but the Ty Cobb of the 21st century? They're a matched set of supremely talented, intelligent, misanthropic megalomaniacs. When it comes to breaking rules, Bonds' steroid use seems less of a public health hazard than Cobb's sharpened spikes."

Anyway, there was absolutely no reason for this repartee to turn ugly, so I shifted to Norman Rockwell mode and motioned at our 10-year-old sons, playing catch 100 yards away with huge smiles on their faces. "I only hope," he said, "that steroids won't take over their lives." My suggestion that the boys, while decent athletes, probably won't even be playing at a competitive level in six years was met with agreement, but with the caveat that steroids use was symbolic of lost youth.

This line of reasoning was even more confusing than an Elizabeth Drew essay, so I switched gears to nostalgia, knowing that we were both from large, middle-class Irish-Catholic families, and hey, wasn't it cool to bring transistor radios to school in the 1960s when the World Series was played during the daytime. That hit the sweet spot, and the tension eased. We traded stories about Boy Scout camp, collecting baseball cards, chucking spitballs in church, eagerly anticipating episodes of The Avengers and later All in the Family, marveling at lightning bugs in the summer, catching crickets, playing outside in the neighborhood until all the moms called everyone home for dinner and the first time we drove the old man's car.

Then, really reaching for the brass ring, I delighted this baseball purist with a recent domestic anecdote: how my horrified wife acceded to our son's request for a block of Velveeta cheese. Booker, who likes cheese on almost everything, was curious about Velveeta since he knew it was a staple of my diet as a kid. "Nothing better than a Velveeta grilled cheese sandwich," I've often said, as Melissa rolled her eyes and asked when I'd segue into a glossy story about Swanson's tv dinners. Naturally, this fellow, also a transplanted New Yorker, also waxed rhapsodically about Velveeta, meat-loaf tv dinners, and then upped the ante to recall when Wise potato chips actually tasted better than any competitors' and Dad's root beer rocked.

The ceremony ended, we went our separate ways, both calm, even if I felt it was pretty weird that two adults had to reach back to their childhood memories to find anything to talk about without getting into an argument.

Blue-State Cultural Analysis

You can flip to almost any page of The New York Times and find an objectionable article-Cranky Frank Rich is the gold standard-but it's been at least a week since I've read anything as stupid as Jennifer 8. Lee's April 10 piece about "man dates." Lee explains that a "man date" is when two heterosexual men get together for an activity in which neither sports or business is involved.

She writes: "Anyone who finds a date with a potential romantic partner to be a minefield of unspoken rules should consider the man date, a rendezvous between two straight men that is even more socially perilous."

Why is this "socially perilous"? Apparently, in today's culture, at least according to this dippy writer, two men going to a movie or dinner together could lead to the conclusion that they're gay.

It wasn't so long ago that such an excursion was called "hanging out."