Misery & Clemency

Or, 1,200 highway miles, ten days, nine baseball teams, six stadiums, five games, steroids, and a funeral

Comments (0) By Sam Eifling Thursday, Apr 14 2005

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Huffman ought to know; after playing catcher in high school and college because he's "a control freak," he began working for the federal prison system at a halfway house for white-collar criminals. As for major leaguers, "it's their body, their money, their lives they're dealing with," he says. "The players are the ones who are going to be paying the price for it later... when they're 45, 50 years old and their joints are wore out and they start having heart problems. If you want to shorten your life by five, ten, 15 years in order to play the game at a higher level, knock yourself out."

In that sense, McGwire isn't like Paul Bunyan, Thor, the Terminator, or whatever other mythologized nonsense was applied to him in the late '90s, when he hit 245 home runs in four years. He and his juiced ilk are more like Achilles, the hero of Greek lore whose mother, Peleus, had the choice of granting him a long, quotidian existence or a short, glorious life. She picked for him the latter. Through The Iliad, he romps as a nigh-invincible destroyer. Yet today, his name is synonymous with his sole weakness.

Deirdra Funcheon

While the clay-stained ballet of spring baseball unfolds, Orioles (and Marlins and Miami Hurricanes) beer vendor Duke Johnson roams the stands, hawking Bud and spreading the gospel of Sammy Sosa.

Sam Eifling

Fans, such as the enterprising Andrea Delisi and Paul Giza, made endless fun of baseball's woes.

Sam Eifling

A photo the author took of his younger brother and grandfather the last time they were together, on December 27, 2004

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Huffman is wrong. McGwire's body isn't the issue. Baseball is America's pastime and a game of grandfathers, fathers, and sons. And when McGwire got the chance to ask mercy for his transgressions before Congress, God, Bud Selig, and the hoi polloi who cheered him, he instead retreated. We can't just ignore him, and possibly Sosa, and maybe Palmeiro, and probably Pudge, and definitely Canseco, and definitely Giambi, and definitely Bonds, as we all ignored the problem for all those years. We need to raise bloody hell about the sham unfolding before us.

McGwire, though, has probably suffered enough. As he sat, incongruously bespectacled, enormous, tap-dancing past perjury last month in Washington, it was evident that he has shouldered enough guilt, enough misery, for his sins. He's entitled to mercy if only he'll ask.

At the end of my baseball sojourn, I place another call to the family. Still trying to figure out who Granddaddy was, maybe for this story, maybe out of curiosity, maybe searching for some form of atonement. My uncle David sympathizes.

"I didn't know him well either," he says of his dad. "He wasn't easy to get to know.

"There's a lot of people of that generation like that, emotionally detached," he says. In large farm families with high mortality rates, "there was a tradition of not getting so attached to your family that if something happened it would devastate you. I think we're still suffering the consequences of that."

Yet another call, my first ever to great uncle Don, my granddaddy's older brother. I tell him I'm working on a baseball story, and he tells me about Granddaddy's pitching softball for the Coca-Cola team in Pine Bluff. He wasn't gifted with a natural fireball pitch but instead mastered tricky finesse pitches. "Your granddad had a way of caressing that ball," Don says, and I can imagine the sturdy, strong version of Granddaddy that I never knew.

To those boys, play was a luxury, Don says. He recalls a time when he worked so long on the rice farm that he stumbled into the kitchen and passed out on the floor. The smell of cooking roused him. He sat up in his filthy work clothes, broke fast, and headed back out. "Farming," he says, weighing a topic on which I know naught. "I could talk all night about farming."

He tells great stories, Uncle Don does. We talk for an hour, easy, on a Friday night. In my search for a grandfather, it seems, I found an uncle, if years too late, yet perhaps in time.