Ted Williams hit a home run with his final swing at Fenway Park, trotted the bases hurriedly, ducked into the dugout and never came out 21 years before I was even born.
It is 21 years later and we have steroids and labor strife and players making $252 million to lead a last-place team.
We have a ridiculous home-run derby with goofy announcers screaming when Sammy Sosa sends one soaring. Yes, the same Sammy Sosa who just last week, refused to take a steroid test offered to him by Sports Illustrated columnist Rick Reilly in the name of cleaning up the game's image, putting it all to rest here and now.
All of which was necessary because guys who just retired from this game decided to let it all out that most of them are juiced-up on steroids and that's why everyone is hitting 35 dingers now, from the 20-year-old rookie to the 38-year-old vet.
Can you help but wonder, watching big Sammy launch ball after ball more than 500 feet into the Milwaukee air?
Sosa hit 12 dingers in the first round of the derby that traveled a combined distance of more than a mile. Then he went on to hit just one in the next round. Kind of makes you wonder.
Can you feel excited about a season that seems to inch closer and closer to a strike every time you open the paper? Can you muster up the time to care anymore, since the top story is always about Bud Selig instead of the Yankees-Red Sox game? Or did you stop caring the last time baseball went on strike and there was no World Series?
Maybe baseball means little to you because of that tragedy on Sept. 11, the day we all should have started caring about something different, and some of us even did.
Ted Williams, by the way, has an answer for attacks on freedom. He skipped out on the best years of his career to go fight in wars - twice. Who knows what his numbers would have been had he stayed. At least 600 homers, probably another .400 year, a third triple crown … Except numbers, they don't mean a thing when you talk about Ted Williams.
The Kid wanted one thing and it is the thing that a lot of people will tell you they also want but are almost never bold or strong or gutsy or brash enough to actually go after: to be the best.
There was an urgency and rage to the way Williams went about the game. Today, we have key words for it like intensity or heart, which are clichéd and empty because we toss them around about guys making millions and whining about it.
Here in Reading, a town that recently dubbed itself Baseball Town, there is a man named Charlie Wagner. Just before the gates open for every Double-A Reading game, he makes his way up to the press box which is named in his honor. Wherever he goes the people are yelling out "Broadway!" because that's what he's been called since he roomed with Ted Williams, the two young and passionate and Charlie always in a fancy suit, then all the way up to today.
Broadway rarely talks about Williams, maybe for the same reason Williams never took a curtain-call after a home run, not even that final heroic one at Fenway that ended his career. I have heard Broadway talk about one of the most famous Ted Williams stories.
"I guess I had been asleep for a long time now," says Broadway, staring out the big glass window at batting practice. "And you know, I thought everything was going fine and Ted was in and tomorrow we'd get up to go for breakfast. But all of the sudden, I'm on the ground and the bed is sliding and things are on top of me and this is the end, I'm thinking, you see, because I thought everything was falling down around me. But it was just Ted, standing up above me with a bat. He was swinging that thing in the room and knocked the bed right over."
Broadway is shaking his head now, a thin smile across it.
And I am thinking that baseball is falling down around me and there is no Ted Williams to look up at.
