Friday, May 12, 2006 | 10:46 a.m.
"Zach!!!" I yell to my son, "I think Barry Bonds is up next."
We're just back from my 9-year-old's Little League game and he's already tuned into the Cartoon Network.
"Tell me if he hits a home run," he says from the other room.
"No, you need to watch this."
I want my kids to love the game as much as I do, or at least I did before everything was blurred by talk of steroids and grand jury investigations and who lied and who didn't.
And then it hits me.
The actual hitting of record home runs, the actual moment Bonds steps into the box, is about baseball, nothing else.
I don't know a lot about a lot of things, but I do know baseball. I started playing in backyards and vacant lots in rural Missouri when I was 3.
In kindergarten in 1965 in Kansas City, I drew my picture in a Kansas City A's uniform, No. 19, Campy Campaneris, and saw him play all nine positions in one game at old Municipal Stadium.
After we moved to Detroit, my second-grade teacher let us watch the Tigers in the 1968 World Series on a big black-and-white TV rolled into the room. My mother let me listen to Ernie Harwell on the radio in bed as Denny McClain chased 31 wins.
For my 11th birthday, my dad won a Detroit Free Press contest for two tickets to the 1971 All-Star Game, where Reggie Jackson homered into the lights on the roof at my beloved Tiger Stadium. The pennant I still have in my family room lists the name of every player in that game - more than a dozen Hall of Famers.
On a family vacation in 1975, I saw Carlton Fisk hit three home runs and drive in all seven runs in a 7-6 win at Fenway Park over Milwaukee, with Hank Aaron. On another, I threw a fit because the rest of the family insisted on attending a space launch at Cape Canaveral the day I'd planned for us to watch the Houston Astros at spring training.
We moved to Des Moines the summer I was heading into eighth grade and the most important part of my Dad's pitch that it would be OK was baseball - they had the Triple-A Iowa Oaks, later the Iowa Cubs.
Much later, my daughters grew up at Sec Taylor Stadium watching those Cubs - Joe Carter and Rafael Palmeiro batted three-four one year with more than 40 homers each. And then at Rosenblatt Stadium in Omaha, and then at Prince William County Stadium in northern Virginia, where Jorge Posada and others played for the Yankees' farm team in the Single-A Carolina League.
Living in Virginia, I fell in love with Camden Yards in nearby Baltimore. I literally got goose bumps watching Cal Ripken two days before 2,131 and made some buddies drive up there with me for the record-setting night just to hang outside the park when we couldn't get tickets.
When we moved to Reno in 1998, my softball playing daughters followed the Mark McGwire homerun chase with me. I took their picture by the TV in our apartment when he hit No. 62.
Now comes steroids. The stain on the game. The talk of asterisks and the questioning of the sanctity of the record books.
To real baseball fans, the record book is like a bible. In fact in some ways, it's more like a bible than THE Bible, less open to interpretation. I know because I got the Baseball Encyclopedia for my 14th birthday.
It has it all. It is objective, right and wrong, black and white. You were safe or out, it was a hit or an error. The records are set. They are accepted. And I like that certainty in an uncertain world.
Of course, it's impossible to maintain an entirely level playing field over time. Roger Maris' longer season attested to that. Travel in the old days was on trains, not planes. Games were played during the day. Paychecks were a drop in the bucket.
And yet, this whole steroid mess has practically ruined the game I love.
What about two years ago when my daughters - even as 15 and 17 year old girls - were excited about going to Pac Bell, now AT&T Park, for the first time to see a Giants-A's exhibition in April? And my son Zach, learning to score a game for the first time?
Has everything changed? Is baseball just another part of the entertainment world? A fixed race? No different than a made-for-TV movie with the sole purpose of maximizing profits for a selected few?
Maybe. Maybe it is, and I guess when I'm mature enough, I'll have to ponder all those questions.
But for now, for a few minutes, when Barry Bonds comes up to bat tonight, and tomorrow night, and maybe the night after that, I'm going to watch. Because it looks like baseball to me.
And I'm probably going to yell, "Zach!! I think Barry Bonds is up next.'"'
And if it happens when there's a commercial break in the cartoons, he'll probably watch too.
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Scott Sonner is The Associated Press' Reno correspondent
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