My favorite baseball team is the Cleveland Indians, as anyone who knows me well could tell you. Yeah, I know...it doesn't seem to make sense that a farm kid from central Kansas would root for a Rust Belt team several states away.
But when I was a young boy, they had a lefthanded fireballer named Sudden Sam McDowell, and I was a lefty who liked to throw hard, so I dubbed myself Sudden Stan. Since he pitched for the Cleveland Indians, they became my team.
From such things loyalties are born. I won't go into what it's been like rooting for a team that hasn't won a World Series in 60 years and hadn't even made it to the Fall Classic in more than 40 (from 1954 to 1995), except to say for a long time .500 seasons were considered a good season, and that when they clinched the Central Division in Baltimore in 1995 I wept unashamedly.
We lost the World Series in 6 games in 1995 and came within a half-inning of winning it all in 1997; then got within one game of the World Series again 10 years later. As this season looms, the Tribe seems poised to threaten for post-season play once again.
But the shadow of steroids lurks near one of the team's key cogs: Travis Hafner. He was one of baseball's most feared power hitters for much of this decade before injuries wrecked the tale end of his 2007 season and all of his 2008 campaign. That downturn in health has coincided with much tougher steroid policies, and folks are wondering (and whispering about) whether it's a coincidence at all.
Hafner has denied steroid use....but so have several athletes who later 'fessed up to getting cozy with a needle. Me? For some silly reason, I believe him. Maybe it's that Midwestern small-town background of his and the culture of straight talk that's bred in such places.
But the bottom line is, all the declarations of innocence mean nothing. And he knows it. He'll have to let his bat do the talking. If he performs like he did up until late in the 2007, those whispers will vanish. If he's a shadow of his former self, no words will convince the doubters.
That's life in the post-steroids era.
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