Feeling Like 'The Kid' Again

"It's because of the life he lives off the field," Goldberg says. "That's a large reason why he has been able to keep the baseball part in perspective. It has not defined him. . . . And it's different now, with the kids getting older. It's different when you're 28 and at the top of your game, and you have two kids, but they're 2 and 4. Hey, he'd still love to win a [World Series] ring or two before he retires. I don't want people to get the idea baseball isn't important to him. It's just that it fits differently within the context of family."

It is difficult to observe the sense of peace that Griffey exudes and not compare it to the very different feeling that trails the fellow superstar whose career is linked so inextricably to his own. In the 1990s, Griffey and Barry Bonds were the undisputed players of the decade for the respective leagues -- Bonds in the NL, Griffey in the AL, where he spent the first 11 seasons of his career with Seattle.

Griffey finished the decade with 382 homers, Bonds with 361. But then things went haywire.

Griffey's production, not withstanding the injuries that have cost him nearly 400 games the past six seasons, has remained fairly steady -- he averaged a homer every 14.1 at-bats in the 1990s and has averaged one every 14.7 at-bats this decade. But Bonds, at a point in his career when history says he should have slowed considerably, grew alarmingly more prolific. His at-bats-per-homer ratio went from one every 13.6 at-bats in the 1990s to one every 8.7 at-bats in the 2000s.

So, where once Griffey was thought to be The One who would surpass 755, now it is Bonds, 42, who sits at 723 -- 164 more than Griffey -- hoping someone gives him a chance to break the record next season.

But while Griffey enjoys the peace of mind of being someone who is regarded as having resisted the Faustian temptation of steroids throughout his career, Bonds is hounded by media reports, an MLB-commissioned investigation and a grand jury probe regarding the alleged steroid use that, it is generally believed, fueled his late-career surge.

Despite the temptations of the era in which he played, Griffey -- who has had a long, close friendship with Bonds -- said he never even encountered the proverbial crossroads where the choice to go down the steroid road was presented to him.

"I was never around it," he says. "My friends didn't do drugs -- I've had the same friends since high school. With a lot of guys, [their introduction to steroids] was through a personal trainer at a gym somewhere -- it had nothing to do with baseball. You go to any gym, and there's somebody who knows something about that stuff.

"But my dad always talked about playing the game right. If someone's better than you, outwork them."

And if that someone is better than you because of illegal drugs, so it goes?

"Yeah, basically," Griffey says.

There are no regrets here about the past, no self-pity over what might have been. And there also is very little serious thought about his baseball future. Griffey's eight-year, $116.5 million contract with the Reds runs through 2008, with a team option for 2009. When that contractual obligation is over, Griffey says, he will make a decision about his future. It's too early to tell now how he might be feeling in two or three years.

What there is, then, is only the present, and what a present it is, with the Reds in the playoff race, a beautiful family to go home to and marvel at, and this warm feeling of peace that has The Kid feeling like The Kid again.