Random Rumblings: A good sign for baseball?

• Amidst all the shouting and lynch-the-cheater talk that took in place in the sports world last week, there was an important group of people who simply didn’t care. In fact, only a handful of my little leaguers even knew who Manny Ramirez was when I asked them, and not one knew that he was suspended for 50 games just the day before.
  
  Without getting into too many details about Manny (“boys, you should never take female fertility drugs”), I tried to teach my team a life lesson after our marathon of a game Friday night. I talked to them about playing the game right (actually going after popups), about supporting each other (by using goofy chants) and never cheating (or stealing each other’s bubble gum). And all I got was confused looks in return.
  
  They know right from wrong. They just didn’t understand why I was talking about some guy most of them had never really seen play. And that’s what got me thinking about the antics of players throughout the history of the game, an argument I normally hate. Guys took amphetamines long before I was even born and they greased up the ball and corked their bats and stole signs long before those magical green pills entered the game.
  
  Why don’t I care? The answer, more than likely, is it just didn’t seem like a big deal when I became a fan. And maybe that’s how the next generation of baseball fans will feel about steroids in baseball. If juicing isn’t rampant over the next ten years, new stars will develop and the game will move on. And hopefully, so will we.
  
  I just wish I could be the one saying, “who’s Manny?”
  
  
• Everyone is slamming Selena Roberts for chasing a paycheck and forgetting about the fact that she broke arguably the biggest story in baseball history. She caught a guy who will make almost a half billion dollars in salary over the course of his career so redhanded that he had no choice but to admit that he was a cheater.
  
  Let’s keep our eye on the ball, folks.
  
  And remember, chances are you were wrong about the Duke Lacrosse case too.
  
  
• I’ve always thought about what it would be like if guys like Mickey Mantle or Babe Ruth lived in a 24/7 media world, the way ARod has to. And then the New York Times had the story about Mantle being allowed to pick the exact location for his second-to-last homerun because he was always “nice” to the guy who threw the pitch, and I thought there would be outrage.
  
  But nope, everyone just seems to think it was kind gesture. Let’s get this straight: Both ARod tipping pitches and Mantle receiving them are despicable, and we need to stay consistent.
  
  
• The Houston Rockets are supposed to be at the forefront of the moneyball-in-basketball era, which is great, but they’ll never get to the top with two guys as fragile as Tracy McGrady and Yao Ming.
  
  
• Josh Beckett hasn’t been great, Jon Lester has been awful and it looks like John Smoltz had a setback. All of a sudden that huge advantage the Sox appeared to have is being called into question.
  
  Maybe the AL East will be interesting after all.