Okay, I need help.  What, exactly, should I be thinking about the whole steroids thing?  Was is illegal when they took it?  Do you take it once?  Twice?  Can you change your mind?  Does the effect last or does it go away?  Was it against league rules?  Team rules?  Are there different kinds of steroids, and are some far less intrusive and altering and potent?  Like the difference between Advil and chemotherapy?  I know that team doctors in the nineties had regular group meetings with all the players in their locker rooms to say that all the stuff was fine, there was no danger, no one cared, etc.  Did management know and look the other way?  Did anyone say this is wrong?  Is it wrong?

In short:  Did they cheat?  Are they cheaters?  Are the guys who took the stuff even once cheaters who shouldn’t be admired?  Because I need to admire them.  That’s part of baseball for me.

I don’t care if they were racists a hundred years ago.  I assume they were, young white men from farms and cities who probably didn’t have what today we’d call generous views of Black and minority and Jewish people.  Let’s remember, though, that would certainly have been the same with all of our grandparents and great-grandparents and everyone before.

But no matter what your ethnic background, I assume you honor and respect the astonishing toughness and grit and hard work and values of your parents and grandparents and great-grandparents.  They were creatures of their times.  I’m just guessing now, but if you asked my great-grandfather what he thought of neighborhoods in the future where Black and Chinese and Mexican and White people would live together and go to the same schools, he wouldn’t even have understood the question.

Remember, if you went over to my parents after World War II when they were looking for a house and said, “Oh, no, we’re not going to send you to a Jewish neighborhood, we’re going to send you to a mixed-religion, mixed-nationality neighborhood,” they would’ve been scared and upset and said, “Don’t you like us?  Have we done something wrong?  Are we being punished?”  People thought it was natural and wonderful to live with their own.  My father used to tell me stories of Brooklyn in the thirties, where there was the Italian and the Irish and the Polish and the Jewish and the Black sections, and if you went into one you weren’t supposed to be you’d get beat up.  I mean, it was just a matter of course, like saying the sun rises in the East.

I’m not saying this was good, and I think, like you, we’ve moved to a better place.  But the point is, I don’t hate old baseball players because they were creatures of their times.  Any more than I hate the players today for being creatures of their times.     

Just the opposite.  I adore David Ortiz.  I’m a great fan of Roger Clemens.  I think A-Rod is great.  And I loved watching last season how Manny single-handedly took the Dodgers from negative six to plus four.

Other guys looked like they took them constantly for years, every day, and just didn’t care, guys like Canseco and Mcguire, more and more to get bigger and bigger, cartoonishly big.  Is there a difference between them and an Andy Petit, who says he just took something once to help him heal from an injury?

I really don’t know how to feel.  Is it okay what they did?  Is it bad, so bad they should be shunned?  Should they be tossed out of the league, the way Kennesaw Mountain Landis would have done in the thirties?  Any one who took anything?

Do the effects of the drugs linger, or if they haven’t taken them in years and years, can I just enjoy them purely, or is there an effect that taints?

The point is:  Can someone please tell us all these things so we can make sense of it and possibly put it all behind?

I may not know much, but one hard blow, not matter how devastating, is always easier and better in the end than The Death of a Thousand Cuts.