Growing up, I always wanted to be a professional baseball player. Ever since I was old enough to lift a bat and put on a glove, I lived, ate and breathed baseball. If you ask the right people, not much has changed.

But I grew up in a simpler, more innocent time in baseball history, when playing whiffle ball in the backyard meant pretending you were your favorite player (I was always either Ryne Sandberg or Roger Clemens). It meant you could have heroes in the game and the players were not bigger than baseball.

Baseball was pure.

Now, baseball has changed.

It has deep, dark secrets. It’s a game of greed, cheaters, and liars. This is not the baseball I grew up with, nor is it the baseball I care to have my future children grow up with.

For the longest time I tried to deny that players used steroids, but as the big names toppled off their heroic thrones, my faith dwindled. Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa, Barry Bonds and even my childhood hero Clemens all made sense after a while, how else could they do what they did?

But Alex Rodriguez, baseball’s golden boy, the savior from the steroid era, just doesn’t make sense. How could someone with such a long career ahead of him throw it all away with one needle?

A-Rod was the last great hope to return baseball to its glory days. Too bad he set it back another 20 years.

In the wake of A-Rod’s supposed positive test, I can’t help but feel betrayed by baseball.

These players have forever altered baseball’s history. All of sudden, Pete Rose seems a more likely hall of fame candidate than the Home Run King.

Baseball’s skeletons are out of the closet, and it’s time for all the players to just fess up and admit to any steroid use. Jason Giambi did so, and while he may never make it to Cooperstown, he’s still in baseball, still playing and was forgiven by Yankees fans, the toughest fans of them all.

Come clean so everything is out and we can move past this dark age of baseball history, so my children can have heroes in this great sport.

So when they’re playing whiffle ball in the backyard, they’re not demanding more money and denying steroid use before leaving the house because that’s what they’re favorite player was doing on TV.

More importantly, come clean for the sanctity of the game, to restore it to what it used to be and make baseball America’s pastime once again.