Getting Through the Dogged Days of Baseball It is possible, with some avoidance strategies, to pretend baseball is still just a nice little summer sport. Granted, you have to squint kind of hard, avoid sports talk radio, avert your eyes every time you see the first few letters of Alex Rodriguez's name and flee to a happy place every time friends start discussing why everyone is still discussing steroids. It's tempting to do all, and glue some blinders on a pair of rose-colored glasses, after enduring a week of waiting for the Biogenesis suspensions shoe to drop Robert Galbraith/Reuters The baseball world is waiting for news about Alex Rodriguez and his likely suspension. None of that means trying to rid the sport of performance-enhancing drugs is a bad idea: they're still not allowed, turn players into walking biochemical experiments and force players who don't want to dope to risk their health to keep up. No, it just means the pursuit is tiring. It doesn't go away in a one-day, staged-for-television drug sting, where the bad guys get perp-walked for the cameras and we all go back to the regularly scheduled programming. Through the messiness of reality, we wait. Rodriguez practices in a fantastic pantomime of rehabbing an injury. Baseball is left hoping that what always brings fans back, the actual sport, will work its magic again, as Mike Vaccaro writes in The New York Post. You can choose to read about the ins and outs of the Biogenesis mess - including a new federal criminal probe into whether Tony Bosch was feeding not just professional athletes, but high school kids, The Miami Herald reports, and how Balco's infamous swashbuckler Jeff Novitzsky may get involved - or you can fish around for those souped-up glasses. With those, it's possible just to enjoy the Red Sox scoring six runs in the bottom of the ninth Thursday night to beat the Mariners, 8-7, in their latest wacky comeback. Or you could marvel at the Rangers" Yu Darvish striking out 14 Arizona Diamondbacks - again. Or you can just sit back and appreciate the skill, and resulting joy, of the Royals" Lorenzo Cain robbing the Twins" Trevor Plouffe of a home run. Video by InsideMLB1 Lorenzo Cain Robs HR Or you can enjoy the rare intersection of two all-time greats that happened late Wednesday night: Dodgers announcer Vin Scully calling Mariano Rivera's save in the Yankees-Dodgers game: Scully calls Mo's save at Dodger Stadium There is also more video evidence that nonbaseball players should leave pitching to the professionals, today's installment provided by N.B.A. stars Blake Griffin, Chris Paul and Carmelo Anthony at a game in Taiwan: All of this is definitely preferable to taking a look around the N.F.L. training camps, where Thursday's news brought more mayhem. San Francisco cornerback Chris Culliver was reportedly lost for the season with a torn anterior cruciate ligament. The damage in the Philadelphia Eagles" camp is mostly psychological, with receiver Riley Cooper's racist rant still reverberating despite Michael Vick's best attempts to make it go away. It is a credit to Vick, Eric Adelson wrote on Yahoo.com, that he so resolutely took the forgiveness route. Oddly enough, Cooper's best role model for how to respond to this is none other than Culliver, who made a sincere effort to smooth over the feelings he trampled on with his homophobic comments before the Super Bowl, wrote Gregg Doyel on CBSSports.com. But just to prove that foot-in-mouth disease is not close to being cured in the N.F.L., we have Vikings receiver Greg Jennings's ill-advised trashing of his former quarterback, Green Bay's Aaron Rodgers, which drew a rebuke from his own coach, as Don Banks wrote on SI.com. Turns out, those industrial strength blinders are useful and not just for baseball fans. Soon, they may sell them with team logos. Follow Leading Off on Twitter: twitter.com/zinsenyt