Fallen heroes don't diminish from a love for the game

There isn't anything that could make me stop loving baseball.

That doesn't mean I have to care at all about the current players. Now that the game is apparently suffering through another doping scandal with some of its very best players, I find myself thinking more and more about players from better times.



There may never be a baseball player who combined an ability for the game and perfect gentlemanliness than the great Christy Mathewson, who played only 16 years and still won 373 games as a great righthanded pitcher.

Nobody ever said a bad word about Matty, who died at age 45 after being tragically gassed after hostilities had ended in World War I. His best-known nickname, a pure compliment, was "The Christian Gentleman."

You'll never hear Milwaukee outfielder Ryan Braun, one of the best players in the modern-day American League called by that sobriquet, although his own nickname explains that. Braun is known as the "Hebrew Hammer," and he has already hit 211 home runs and been named both Rookie of the Year and Most Valuable Player as well as being a five-time All-Star by age 29.

Braun, however, has already been tainted twice by steroids. He was suspended for the first 50 games of the 2012 season, although it was overturned on a technicality, and he was just this week suspended for the final 65 games or the current season.

Who knows where his career will go from here, although national sports columnist Gregg Doyel points out that Braun's statistics have been so consistent that he probably has been juicing all along and calls him "a cheater and a liar."

But just when you think it can't get worse ...

Alex Rodriguez has five more years remaining on his contract with the New York Yankees, a contract the Yankees are desperately trying to void. They are paying him $28 million dollars this year and he has yet to appear in a single major league game. In fact, he apparently is so deeply entangled in the same scandal as Braun that there is speculation he will be given a lifetime ban from the game.

At one point, Rodriguez appeared to be a lock to break the all-time career home run record. When he hit 54 home runs and drove in 156 runs in his age 31 season, he had 518 home runs. At the end of that season, he renegotiated and signed a contract with the Yankees to play 10 more years.

The next five seasons brought 35, 30, 30, 16 and 18 home runs.

And of course, zero so far this year.

Heroes? Not anymore.

But there are still plenty of greats, and there's always Matty, the greatest of them all.

His memorabilia is far too expensive for me, but I was certainly happy to see that my Herb Score baseball came the other day.