Bobby Thomson died last week, and Roger Clemens was indicted. No juxtaposition could better capture the way we used to feel about our sports heroes, and the way we feel about them now. Clemens is just one of the many baseball superstars credibly accused of using performance-enhancing drugs. But the Red Sox-turned-Yankee ace has achieved a particular infamy because he keeps obdurately denying it -- to fans, to reporters and finally (and fatefully) to a congressional committee. Other athletes have apologized, beaten their breasts and tried to move on. But not Clemens. A mercenary figure during his career, in retirement the pitching great has become an icon of celebrity entitlement and public dishonesty: part LeBron James, part Richard Nixon. If Clemens embodies baseball's decline into sordidness and scandal, Thomson's death is a reminder of the height from which it's fallen. 'The shot heard round the world,' his pennant-winning home run for the New York Giants in the autumn of 1951, stands as the crowning glory of baseball's golden age. All the romance of a bygone American era hovered around that day. It was the Dodgers and the Giants, the New York of Frank Sinatra and Marilyn Monroe, the American century at its peak. And then there was the contest itself, thrilling and improbable and perfect. 'The art of fiction is dead,' Red Smith's famous account began. 'Reality has strangled invention. Only the utterly impossible, the inexpressibly fantastic, can ever be plausible again ...' That was sports at its best, surely. A day for honorable ballplayers, not corrupt multimillionaires. A day untainted by cheating or dishonesty. A game reduced to a pitcher, a batter, and a single pitch -- and the crackle of a radio man shouting 'The Giants win the pennant!' Except that cheating did taint Thomson's famous shot. For decades, it was rumored that the Giants' amazing 1951 stretch run -- they made up a 13-game deficit to force the playoff with the Dodgers -- had been abetted by a sign-stealing system devised by their manager, Leo Durocher. Finally, the truth leaked out: For the last 10 weeks of the season, and throughout the showdown with the Dodgers, the Giants used a centerfield telescope and a complex system of signals to tell their batters what pitch was coming next. In Joshua Prager's book on that pennant race, 'The Echoing Green,' he asks an aging Thomson -- the kindest, most modest man imaginable, by all accounts -- about the sign-stealing and his immortal three-run blast. The conversations that follow are agonizing. Did he look for the signal on that pitch? 'I'd have to say no more than yes,' Thomson says. Then: 'I don't like to think of something taking away from it.' Then, in a later discussion: 'It would take a little away from me in my mind if I felt I got help on that pitch.' Then, finally: 'My answer is no.' And a coda: 'I was always proud of that swing.' Somewhere, waiting for his day in court, Roger Clemens is probably telling himself similar things. Whatever the truth about the drugs he took or didn't take, he wants to believe -- and wants us to believe -- that all his achievements, all his wins and strikeouts, belong to him and not to any secret advantage he obtained. Thomson was caught up in a team-wide escapade, whereas Clemens' drug-related decisions were his and his alone. But when we think about the outcast pitcher -- and about the whole steroids scandal -- we should keep their parallel stories in mind, and perhaps judge modern athletes more leniently. Not because the steroids scandal wasn't distinctively ugly, and distinctively devastating. But it's part of a pattern that runs back through all of baseball's past -- through the amphetamines that veterans pressed on younger players, the spitballs pitchers boasted about throwing, and every other edge that athletes turned to in duress. What's more, we know so little, even now, about who used steroids, and how often, and how it shaped the game. And for every Clemens or Barry Bonds or Mark McGwire being held up for public flagellation, there's doubtless a future Hall of Famer -- or a scrappy, beloved 'gamer' -- whose drug use is still as secret as the 1951 Giants' sign-stealing used to be. What Roger Clemens wants -- what he's recklessly pursued, to the point where he's facing perjury charges and possibly jail -- is what Bobby Thomson enjoyed. He wants to be judged on what happened on the field, where pitches are thrown and swings are taken, and everything else fades into irrelevance. We know too much to give him that. But though he hasn't asked for it, maybe we also know enough about baseball history to give him our forgiveness. 