A Break from the “Baseball Shame”
December 22, 2007 
With all the talk of steroid use and performance-enhancing drugs in major league baseball lately, I was happy to find a Sports Illustrated story that addressed a different bit of baseball news.
That news being the destruction of a priceless World Series artifact, the ball that recorded the final out in the 2007 Fall Classic:
The World Series ball is gone, and Jonathan Papelbon has an excuse: My dog ate it. Farfetched or not, that’s what the Red Sox closer insists happened to the souvenir from the final out of Boston’s sweep this year.
Really, Papelbon blamed it on his bulldog, Boss.
“He plays with baseballs like they are his toys,” Papelbon told the Hattiesburg (Miss.) American. “He jumped up one day on the counter and snatched it. He likes rawhide. He tore that thing to pieces. Nobody knows that. I’ll keep what’s left of it.”
Now that’s a new one. Although, considering Papelbon is such a colorful character, this couldn’t have happened to anyone else. No one would have believed it if it had.
December 31st, 2007 at 2:25 PM
To much is made of sports records Bonds, Tiger woods, New England etc. All of the records are only interesting for the here and now 500 years from now no one walking this earth will care who did what back in our time. The people in the future will most likely have other interests and most if not all of the sports that we know will not exist in the future.