Richard Whalen

Major League Baseball will survive its doping scandal because no one, least of all cynical adult fans, really cares what absurdly over-paid professional ballplayers do to themselves to enhance their performance and pay, and our pleasure, any more than audiences care about coked-up musicians or strung-out dancers. Rules are assumed to be made to be bent, broken and evaded in all walks of American life.

Baseball, once the ruling passion of my adolescent life in Queens, has become for me a sometime peripheral interest, reawakened during the fall playoffs. From 1946 to abut 1960, I rooted for the Brooklyn Dodgers during their era of transcendent greatness – the glory years of Jackie Robinson, Pee Wee Reese, Carl Furillo, Duke Snider and Carl Erskine.

The Dodgers were a blue-color team. Robinson enjoyed the highest salary at a mere $40,000. During the winter, Furillo worked in the neighborhood at his uncle’s butcher shop. Phil Rizzuto came back to teach at Richmond Hill High School. Almost every October, the Dodgers or the Giants or the Yankees – always the lordly, despised Yankees -- would make it to the World Series – and everything else would stand still until the World Champions were crowned.

In contemporary America, baseball is a game of the suburbs, organized by adults and force-fed at too early an age to small children who are not mature enough physically to play it well competitively and who will drop it in their teens for soccer. As a result, serious amateur baseball is played mostly in small towns and villages and in blue-collar, downscale urban settings and in traditional schools and colleges. In New York, the self-starting gang of teenagers who play well as a uniformed team against other neighborhood teams is an anachronism nowadays like delivery boys or mobile knife sharpeners or door-to door-peddlers.

I remember how my team, dressed in our red and white Richmond Hill Cardinals uniforms, would deliver the Long Island Press on our bicycles at dawn on Sunday mornings and then travel by city bus, south on Lefferts Boulevard to Baisley Park, where we would play a double-header in the Queens Alliance League. None of us ever got arrested or into serious trouble – we were too tired.

Those were simpler times, of course – or so it seemed. As I replay in my mind the unforgettable games of that era, the stolen bases and game-winning home runs and the thrill of being respected for what I contributed, I realize how much baseball taught me about growing up without much money in what I now think of as “the People’s Republic of Queens.”

“Cheating in baseball is just like hot dogs, French fries and cold Cokes,” Billy Martin, the pugnacious former infielder and manager once declared, a sentiment echoed, in an interview, by the baseball historian John Thorn, whose book “Baseball in the Garden of Eden,” is to be published in the spring, according to Bruce Weber in last Sunday’s New York Times Week in Review.

“Cheating is not merely countenanced in baseball,” Mr.Thorn said. “It is loved.”

At the heart of our Richmond Hill community in the 1950s was baseball, invented around the time of the Civil War as “the New York Game.” Baseball remains at the heart of America.