When most delve into summers past, they conjure up memories of barbecue cookouts and long walks on the beach and sex with Peggy Sue in the back of a T-Bird. I have no such recollections. Well, scratch that. I do have a few, but they’ve all been obscured by the summer of ’92—the worst friggin’ summer of my life.

It was a time when, against better judgment, I left my family, my friends, and my quaint lakefront hometown in upstate New York to take a $5-an-hour internship at the News-Gazette in middle-of-nowhere Champaign, Ill. Here’s how bad it was: My editor hated me. I could barely write a boxscore. I severely sprained my right ankle playing basketball, spent two weeks on crutches, returned to the court and—first game back—broke my other ankle. I had no friends. I was too young to get into any bars. My 13-inch black-and-white TV received two shows: Star Trek and the 700 Club. I didn’t know how to cook and called home to ask Mom why I was unable to slice open a cantaloupe with a butter knife. Occasionally my upstairs neighbor would scream “Stop hitting me! Stop hitting me!” at her boyfriend.

On the nights I didn’t weep, I bawled. On the nights I didn’t bawl, I sat in bed and wondered why God was punishing me.

Then, one morning, the phone rang.

It was Joe Lombardi, sports editor of my hometown paper, The Patent Trader. He wanted to know if I’d be interested in making the two-hour drive to Chicago’s Comiskey Park for a Mariners-White Sox game on August 1. Though Seattle was terrible, its star was a rookie southpaw pitcher named Dave Fleming—a kid born and raised right up the street from me in Mahopac, N.Y. The Patent Trader wanted a profile.

“You don’t even have to pay me,” I told Lombardi. “Just get me the hell out of Champaign.”

The day turned into more than just a momentary escape from purgatory. Though my goal was to write sports for a living, I had never before stepped onto the field of a major league stadium. It was as if, with one small step through the turnstile, I was transported to Wonderland.

I can still smell Comiskey’s grass. I can still hear the thud-thud-thud coming from the batting practice cage; the pop of rawhide hitting glove. I stepped into the Mariners’ clubhouse to meet Fleming and was overwhelmed by a sandlotter’s wildest dream: jars upon jars of Bazooka Bubble Gum, Ho-Hos, Twinkies, Blow Pops, Animal Crackers. Fleming and I sat down in the visitor’s dugout to talk. Yesterday I was watching this guy pitch at my high school field; now, here we were, major leaguer and journalist.

Once the game started, I spent two innings in the dank press box before snapping to my senses. The sun was shining, the breeze was slight, and the day was lazy. I rolled up my sleeves, bought a hot dog (extra relish, a drop of mustard), and a large Coke and found an empty seat along the third-base line. Though the game was an 8-1 White Sox romp, I could care less. The soothing voice of the PA announcer put me into a trance; each “Now batting, catcher, Dave Valle…” was music to my ears. I stood for the seventh-inning stretch, clapped along with “YMCA,” and gorged on soggy pretzels.

“This,” I thought to myself, “is the best day of my life.”

Fifteen years later, I have enjoyed plenty more “best days,” but fewer and fewer involving baseball. What can I say? Things changed.

It began with the so-called “magical” summer of ’98, when Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa engaged in a home run chase that anyone with a working brain now considers slightly less legitimate than a wooden nickel. Throw in alleged juicers like Jason Giambi, Rafael Palmeiro, and—of course—Barry Bonds, and what are we left with? As Bonds closes in on supplanting Hank Aaron as baseball’s all-time home run leader, he isn't simply cheating to break a record. No, he's cheating to expunge a man from the books who faced such intense racial hatred in 1974 that he endured multiple death threats and had to hire private security to watch his family. Aaron’s mark was not one for baseball, but civil rights. It was larger than life. It was … America.

Baseball—my baseball—has been rotted to its core; reduced from an American pastime cherished for its innocence to an American pastime cherished for its large supply of needles and medical supplies. It is sad and depressing and, quite frankly, I’d leave baseball for dead if not for one slight problem: I still love the game. Damn, I really do.

For every Barry Bonds, there are 100 Dave Flemings—good guys just dying to play a boy’s sport. When I’m able to look past the drugs and lying, I try and picture myself back in Comiskey on that summer afternoon, when my troubles were washed away, 6-4-3. That’s what baseball—at its best—did and still does. It takes you away. It drifts you off. It’s an alternative … to everything real.

Like it or not, baseball maintains a certain ethereal quality that prevents its extinction. Yes, the players cheat. And yes, the ticket prices are outlandish. And yes, unless you’re a Yankee, Red Sox, Dodger, or Met fan your team probably doesn’t spend enough to satisfy its fan base. But name a better way to spend a summer day than in a sunny seat in the stands, a program in one hand, a tall cold one in the other.

It’s what keeps you coming back. What keeps me coming back.

All these years later, through nearly a decade and a half of covering the game for Sports Illustrated and ESPN.com, inside of me remains a piece of that gawky, wide-eyed 20-year-old caught up in the moment.

I hope it never goes away.

Jeff Pearlman is the author of Love Me, Hate Me: Barry Bonds and the Making of an Antihero. He is a former Sports Illustrated senior writer and currently writes for ESPN.com.

Photography Betsy McDonald