ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the reporting of numbers and drugs in professional baseball as validating the game’s intersubjective and moral pasts. It argues that the pasts allow baseball fans and reporters to engage in boundary maintenance that separates the honored place of extraordinary accomplishments in the form of numbers from dishonorable acts and deeds that should have no place in baseball. The chapter also discusses the comments on the suspension of Darryl Strawberry who tested positive for cocaine and was suspended for the entire 2000 season. Commissioner Bud Selig suspended Strawberry for the entire 2000 baseball season after he tested positive for cocaine on 19 January. Differences between local coverage and that elsewhere seemed to differ along the lines of whether to try and understand Strawberry and salvage his commitment to a moral past or to skewer him as an enemy of such a past and an enemy of the spirit of pure play.
