I'll skip any necessary introductions and get right to the point.
Ryan Howard is good.
I would say I was with the majority of sports fans over the Labor Day weekend. I was a sucker for the Agassi story, I was rooting for Tiger and I certainly felt dumb when my upset special of Northern Illinois over Ohio State went down the drain in the first five minutes of the game. We all can dream, right?
Meanwhile, a guy in Philadelphia is doing something remarkable that very few are noticing. And if they are noticing, they aren't admiring the importance of it.
Ryan Howard hit three home runs on Sunday afternoon and added another on Monday. That's 53 home runs entering the final stretch of the season, and it seems like he's just heating up. If it were 1998, Agassi and Tiger might be cast aside to ESPNEWS, and the Teddy Ginn Jr. hype wouldn't start until at least October.
See, I'm a firm believer that ironically, steroids saved baseball. What Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa did in 1998 was the biggest thing to ever happen to the game. I feel betrayed to find out that they were both most likely on steroids, but at the same time I know that the summer of '98 awoke America and reminded us all how much we loved the game before the players' strike of 1994.
Steroids or no steroids, the hype around the 1998 home run chase was much deserved. The home run is the most exciting play in baseball. It's not the most important, nor the second most important, but that doesn't mean that it is wrong to count the total home runs a player has before looking at their batting average or RBI total.
Ryan Howard has an opportunity this month to be the first player in the steroid testing era to pass Roger Maris' single season home run record and to many it would not only be a big deal, but a sigh of relief. The home run totals of Barry Bonds, Sosa and McGwire might never be surpassed, but for those of us who feel cheated by those numbers, we will find great satisfaction in seeing any player reach 62 home runs without steroids.
That player might be Ryan Howard. He's a guy who in his first full year is making Jim Thome an afterthought in Philadelphia. Never has a guy not in a trade, made one look so good.
I just hope and pray that the Eastern Seaboard Programming Network realizes that this is a story with a lot of significance. For sports fans, the steroid scandals that have now spread into every sport are the equivalent of telling us our girlfriend of three years is really a dude. We've been played.
Yeah, Bonds is half man and half Terminator. Floyd Landis is half man and half testosterone. The 2003 Carolina Panthers were half football players and half actual panthers.
Howard, however, is just plain good. He's a very strong guy with a great swing, a .309 average and a clean record.
Some could make the argument that players can still get away with steroids or HGH, but we need to trust baseball.
But why should we trust baseball? All I can say is that they are doing drug testing now, and from what I can gather, 99 percent of the players who haven't used performance enhancers were just as hurt as we were when the truth came out.
Howard has a chance to do something great this month and make up for a lot of sins that he never actually committed himself.
62 is the new 74 and Ryan Howard is going to get there.
