Where have you gone Joe DiMaggio?
Baseball used to be a great sport in the eyes of many people but it continues to drop in stature and importance in our lives by the continued revelations from the player’s illegal drug use and bad behavior.
In my youth it was a rite of passage between father and son or daughter to take the kids out to a ball game and enjoy an afternoon outdoors eating hot dogs and peanuts while watching our favorite team’s battle to a pennant.
Those days have long been gone in the last twenty years as more and more incidents happen giving the world a view into a sport that for years was highly respected and regarded as “every boys dream”.
The baseball strike of 1994 decimated the image and popularity of the sport. That great bond once experienced between fans and their heroes on the diamond has been shattered again and again. Today’s baseball players lack the passion and swagger that once made the greatest of the greats household names giving us a glimpse into the greed and arrogance that most players today have about their sport.
They do not play for the love of the game like stars from our youth.
Names like Vida Blue, Hank Aaron, Fergie Jenkins and others truly loved the game and its fans. It was a caring and nurturing relationship with everyone invested in the outcome over any given season.
The endless parade of alleged steroid users only echoes the larger picture of baseball’s sad state in
“My mistake was because I was immature and I was stupid,” Rodriguez said.
That explains everything to the fans . . . all is well again in the houses of summer. We probably will continue to be gullible to the sport.
These lines –
"Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio?
Our nation turns its lonely eyes to you.
What's that you say, Mrs. Robinson?
Joltin' Joe has left and gone away."
On a side note:
In a New York Times op-ed in March 1999, shortly after DiMaggio's death, Paul Simon explained that the line was meant as a sincere tribute to DiMaggio's unpretentious heroic stature, in a time when popular culture magnifies and distorts how we perceive our heroes. He further reflected: "In these days of Presidential transgressions and apologies and prime-time interviews about private sexual matters, we grieve for Joe DiMaggio and mourn the loss of his grace and dignity, his fierce sense of privacy, his fidelity to the memory of his wife and the power of his silence." Simon subsequently performed Mrs. Robinson at Yankee Stadium in DiMaggio's honor in April of the same year.
Alex Rodriguez as good as he was, is just another in a long line of disappoints to the fans of a great game.
For the Love of the Game? Not anymore it seems . . . it’s all about big business now . . . which is a sad state for many young and older people who looked up to our view of a hero.
Ice
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