dale murphy is concerned for our children

i am a day late referencing this story due to working yesterday morning, but i wanted to comment on it anyway. it provides an interesting conflict, for me anyway, between the unconditional love of a childhood hero vs. the unconditional respect i have for the new home run king. the story came out yesterday that dale murphy, my all-time favorite baseball player, thinks that barry bonds is a "terrible example for our kids." He is also quoted as saying that he knows, "without a doubt", that barry used performance enhancing drugs. and this enlightens me to something i never knew about dale murphy. dale murphy used to stick needles filled with horse testosterone into barry bonds butt.

right? i mean, he said without a doubt, which means he has what we have wanted all along with this whole steroids/barry bonds mess. empirical, first hand evidence of barry bonds juicing. and the only way he could have such evidence that would lead him to making such a claim is if he was holding one of barry's butt cheeks in one hand, telling him that "this may sting a little" (or a lot depending on the quality of the horse testosterone), sticking the needle in the other cheek and then emptying the syringe. thank you, dale murphy, for closing the book on this oh-so-frustrating story.

obviously, i am giving good 'ole dale a hard time. i mean, he is mormon, so the real story here is which one of his wives came to him and told him that it was time for him to throw his two cents in. the older, fat one that usually cooks dinner. the middle-aged, soft-spoken one that takes all the kids to school. or the trophy-wife one that is just pissed off that the older, fat one got dale in bed before she did. listen, it's hard for me to swallow all of barry's accomplishments as "natural", whatever that even means. but the more i hear people like bob costas bash the guy, the more i sympathize with him. the more i want to cheer him on. the more i want him to set the record so far out there that even arod can't catch him. the more i want to give him a big hug and tell him that this too shall pass. and i appreciate dale for his concern for hannah and caroline and all the other children in the world that he is certain will try steroids because he "knows" barry did, but i have a message for dale. shut the fuck up!

we are not all experts on everything. when did it become so unacceptable to just say i don't know? when some reporter approached dale about barry, shouldn't the response have been something like, "well, he looks bigger to me than we he first came up, but if we are going strictly on putting on weight as you get older, someone must be injecting me with hgh...in. my. belly. hahahahahahaha!!!", and let that be it? but no, he had to act offended at the thought of someone not hank aaron, someone not as mormon as he is having the record and just couldn't deal with it. or maybe he had some other motive. who knows. and i mean, i get it. i do. when someone asks me a question at the store about fish that i don't know, it would make me sound better if i made up some bullshit about ph and nitrate and blah, blah, blah. but i don't. if i don't know for sure, i ask someone else and hope that the customer respects my want to be honest over my want to be "right."

i guess i shouldn't complain too loudly. i like to know what athletes are thinking just like the rest of us. and i've often wondered about how cool it would be to talk baseball and hitting with dale murphy, but, most of the time, i just come away disappointed because i realize that they don't have any special insight into anything other than the sport they are really good at. and this is another example of that. i guess if i ever talk to dale, i'll ask him about baseball or about how he keeps his wives from killing each other.

i just won't ask him about barry. he may take hannah and caroline away from me and throw him in his barry-free basement never for me to see them again.