First posted on Thursday, Aug. 11

When Congress wanted to hold hearings on steroids I was amazed. Don't we have bigger problems in this country?

I had just been to Iraq six months earlier and found out there is a giant war going on. And when I was a player with the Cincinnati Reds, my teammates and I helped raise money for the homeless.

Just examples of the far more pressing questions in this country than why does Rafael Palmeiro use steroids, or why did any of the eight out of the 1,200 major-league roster players get caught using a banned substance?

Let me get this straight, one more time, baseball is the root of all the problems in America?

If I take 1,200 policemen, 1,200 firemen, 1,200 doctors, 1,200 politicians and 1,200 airline pilots, how many of them do you think would test positive for a banned substance? Yeah you got it, more then baseball. So why is it when baseball has a problem it's more important to clean it up than the rest of the country? I can't figure that one out either.

I was driving into work today and heard this bleeding-heart writer on a radio show. He said, "If I ever have children, and maybe one is a boy, and 20 years from now, if we are at a ballgame, and someone hits a pitch out of the ballpark and he asks me who hit the most home runs ever? Well, if it's a steroid user, or a rumored user, how will I explain to him what has happened to our game? The cheaters have taken that away from us."

Are you freaking kidding me? I almost crashed my truck.

I am a father of two children and I do get asked way tougher questions everyday. Like "Dad, why is that man living on the street? Dad, why are all those men and woman dying in Iraq?"

I'm sorry I got political on you, but let's get serious. Baseball is a game, it's not a social issue. I played it, I should know. AIDS, cancer, war ... these are social issues, and of far greater importance than Major League Baseball.

Can we all just wake up, and stop crying about baseball and stop trying to fix the world through baseball? Enjoy the game, it's a distraction, it's entertainment. But I don't think it will cure cancer; I should know, my father died from cancer.

To me it's simple, let baseball clean up its own act or else. And let the government clean up the country.