The news is filled with steroids, drug testing, revenue sharing, arbitration, greedy players and greedier owners, but despite all that, baseball will always be a game of innocence to me.

I guess my naivete comes from my childhood. My best friend from elementary school was a kid from my teeball team named Jojo who just showed up at my house one day with his glove and a ball and asked me if I wanted to play catch. For a six-year old who loved baseball, such a gesture was tantamount to instant friendship. It turned out that Jojo lived just a block away from my house and so the two of us — along with another neighborhood kid named Josh — would spend countless summer hours in the backyard playing three-way whiffle ball with invisible base runners and without a neutral umpire, which led to more than a couple pretty heated arguments where somebody went home mad. But they always came back the next day because there was always another game to be played, and who better to play it than us?

At some point we discovered the home run derby, which on really hot days was somewhat more appealing than all this running the bases stuff. Plus, it was a lot less work for the invisible base runners to do. My backyard was never very big, and so even with whiffle balls and plastic bats we had to institute some ground rules so that we wouldn’t lose too many balls. First of all, left field was off-limits. The shape of the yard made it too easy to hit it out to left, and besides that, Clyde — the neighbor on that side — didn’t like kids climbing over his fence to retrieve balls. That’s not to say that we didn’t do it, but we tried to make sure he wasn’t home before we did.

My neighbor on the right field side was Keiko. After we knocked on her door a couple dozen times asking if we could go get our ball, she told us that we could come through her side gate whenever we wanted. She instantly became my favorite neighbor. On top of that, she had a daughter named Nancy who was a couple years older than my friends and I. Every once in a while, Nancy would do some sunbathing in her backyard. Needless to say, on those days there was less argument about who had to go retrieve the ball.

There was, of course, the wall of bamboo to deal with in Keiko’s yard if the ball made it over the fence, but even making it to the bamboo was no small task. There is a giant weeping willow that sits near the center of my backyard and so any ball hit too hard and too high would be knocked down by the branches and dropped harmlessly back onto the grass. I loved and hated that tree depending on whose potential home run it ruined.

Those were my summer days. Playing baseball, eating lunch and then playing more baseball. It wasn’t just playing, though. My mom insists that I learned to read because I wanted to be able to read the sports page while eating breakfast. In the evenings, I’d often retreat to my room to listen to Hank Greenwald broadcast the Giants game as I fell asleep. My day was filled from morning until night with a game that filled my summers as a kid, and so it’s no wonder that I still love it to this day.

Unfortunately, I don’t have the space to tell you about the radio I saved up to buy so I could listen to Giants games, how the Bay Area ruled the baseball world in ’89, how the strike in ’94 broke my heart or how I nearly knocked myself unconscious trying to be Kevin Mitchell. Baseball may not be what it was to me as a kid, but no matter how much the game changes; to me it is still a game of innocence.