Ah, baseball!

Despite all the misfortune that has befallen it through its long history, our National Pastime is experiencing its umpteenth rebirth as it heads into the final weekend of the 2007 regular season.

Attendance is at an all-time high. There is greater parity among the 30 major league teams than ever before. Excitement is at a fevered pitch with all four playoff berths in the National League still up for grabs among seven teams. A new generation of superstars is emerging. The game has survived the steroids scandal and all its other attempts at suicide.

Yes, the most democratic of our three major sports (football and basketball depend too much on players of outsized physical proportions --7-footers and 320-pounders) is in good shape.

What fun these next three days will be for fans from the concrete canyons of New York City to the natural canyons of Arizona, from historic Philly to tacky Tinseltown, from the heartland precincts of Chicago and Milwaukee to the Rocky Mountains of Colorado.

Baseball. What a magical institution.

Cheating is a baseball tradition

Barry Bonds, who's just four home runs shy of Hank Aaron's career record at this writing, is in Chicago this week for a four-game set between his San Francisco Giants and the Cubs.

The city's boo-birds and sports moralists doubtless are ready for the occasion. They say it'll be an injustice when Bonds breaks Aaron's record. They say the guy is a cheater who took performance-enhancing drugs. They say he's a disgrace to the game.

I say screw the whole lot of them.

Even if Bonds has been a cheater -- although he's never formally been charged as such and has never flunked a drug test -- his sins are only part of baseball's colorful mosaic of cheating, which goes back to the sport's earliest days. Hell, even Albert G. Spalding, the Rockford product who turned baseball into the National Pastime, cheated with his utterly fictitious story that the game was invented by Abner Doubleday. There's no evidence that Doubleday ever even saw a baseball game, much less came up with the idea.

The history of baseball is one long story of cheating and unfairness and inconsistencies that should warrant a giant asterisk of qualification on the whole damn book of records. Consider, for example, that Hank Aaron was the first black player to hit more than 700 homers mainly because black players were barred from the major leagues through most of the first half of the 20th century. If Josh Gibson, the fabled Negro League star, had been given the chance, might he have hit even more homers than Aaron did? We'll never know.

We'll also never know whether Babe Ruth would have hit 714 homers if the live-ball era hadn't dawned early in his career. And then there's the question of the even-livelier-ball era of more recent decades. And the question of who would have hit more or fewer homers if the dimensions of baseball parks were standardized. And the question of how many homers actually were hits that bounced off the field and over the fence back when that was the rule.

Countless other questions arise with regard to the lowering of the pitcher's mound by one-third in 1969, and with regard to the not-so-uncommon practice of pitchers illegally doctoring the ball with saliva, Vaseline, emory boards, sandpaper, thumbtacks and who-knows what-else.

There are questions that arise with regard to bats illegally filled with cork or superballs, or with regard to groundskeepers secretly altering the playing surface to benefit the home team, or with regard to spies in manually-operated scoreboards illegally stealing signs from the visiting team. There are questions about the effects of the designated-hitter rule in the American League and the advent of artificial playing surfaces.

There are lingering questions about the effects of gambling on baseball. And about the effects of multimillion-dollar contracts, which allow players to indulge in physical-fitness regimens that poorly-paid baseballers of yore couldn't afford to pursue in light of their off-season jobs.

Perhaps the most ridiculous reason to begrudge Barry Bonds the career record for home runs is that he's reputed to be a jerk, a sullen, unsociable fellow. Hey, does the name Ty Cobb ring a bell? By all accounts, he was a truly awful person. And how about all the racist players who gave Jackie Robinson a bad time?

So, yeah, go for it, Barry. Baseball somehow will survive the unfairness of it all.

Dimwit of the day

The Republican congressman here in RascalLand, Don Manzullo, doesn't often vote the way I would prefer, but he's not nearly as much an idiot as one his downstate colleagues, John Shimkus, who represents the Collinsville area across the river from St. Louis.

Shimkus, you may recall, was chairman of the House Page Board when Mark Foley was trying to have his way with some of the lads. In numerous other ways, Shimkus has distinguished himself as one of the dimmest bulbs in Congress.

Today, in a speech on the floor of the House, Shimkus likened the war in Iraq to a baseball game between the St. Louis Cardinals and the Chicago Cubs. You can find the text and video here.

UPDATE (Thurs., May 3): It seems that The Rascal wasn't the only one who found Shimkus' baseball metaphor inappropriate. Check this.

Why don't many blacks play baseball?

On this 60th anniversary of Jackie Robinson's breaking of the color barrier in baseball, only nine percent of big leaguers are blacks.

It occurs to The Rascal that too many African-American kids have dreams of playing in the National Basketball Association. They would do better to try baseball, where even relatively short or stocky players can make it if they have the abilities.

Community leaders in Rockford, which has a sizable black population (and which has rich baseball traditions dating back to the game's earliest days), would do well to promote this greatest of sports in the schools and at the neighborhood level.