The Arizona Diamondbacks’ news release showed up on my computer screen at about one o’clock Tuesday, and I spent most of the rest of the day reliving my youth. I doubt that the announcement of Joe Garagiola’s retirement at the age of 87 had that effect on anyone else.

Most people hearing about Garagiola’s retirement probably didn’t know he had still been working and those who did know most likely knew and thought of him as a baseball announcer, maybe a baseball comic and one of the best. Bob Uecker wouldn’t very likely exist if Garagiola hadn’t blazed the path.

But I was familiar with Garagiola before his 58-year television and comedy careers began. Garagiola was a baseball player, and he spent part of his major league career squatting behind home plate about three miles from where my mother put dinner on my plate at home every evening.

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Pittsburgh Pirates fans, of whom I was one in my youth, didn’t know how to react. After suffering through 19 consecutive losing seasons, the fans were in ecstasy early in August last season. But they wound up in agony and disbelief.

That the Pirates wound up with their 20th consecutive losing season the fans could believe because they had become inured to losing. The disbelief arose from the revelation that the Pirates were engaged in a program of bizarre conditioning of their young minor league players.

The club had retained an outfit of former Navy SEALs to work with the players and put them through mental and physical routines that stunned the baseball world – players running along a Florida beach toting small telephone poles, having sand thrown on them, being sprayed with a hose.

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With his many zealous fans lined up to buy their hero’s book, Mike Piazza figures to soon have a place on the best-seller list. The book, however, will most likely be on the wrong list. It would be more properly placed under fiction.

Up front, let me acknowledge that in his playing career, Piazza never tested positive for use of banned performance-enhancing substances. I will also acknowledge that I believe in the jurisprudence of innocent until proven guilty.

However, the steroids era of baseball has prompted me to adopt a variation of that theme. It’s now innocent until proven circumstantially guilty. Substitute common-sense for circumstantially if you’d like; it comes out the same way. If you’d prefer, you can use insultingly.

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