On the day he found out they were going to make a movie about him, the first person Miguel Angel Sano told was his mom. "I'm gonna be famous," he said.

He spoke with the wonderment of an impoverished 15-year-old, which the world believed he was at the time. It is not that simple, of course, in the Dominican Republic. Something so fundamental as age is often a matter of dispute. The truth is pliable in the D.R. It bends and bows, molds itself to personal convenience, buoys those willing to exploit it. It is not supposed to do such things. The truth is supposed to be the truth, reality, a rock for the innocent, but then this is the Dominican Republic, where fact takes on multiple incarnations.

Miguel Sano's journey ultimately led to a contract with the Twins in 2009. (Getty Images)One truth, in Miguel Sano's case, emanates from the mouth of a man named Rene Gayo. He sits in an old Victorian chair. He is fat and mustachioed. His parents emigrated from Cuba to the United States, where he grew up and pursued a career in baseball – a career, by many accounts, filled with

The strangers in the van looked sideways at the large man taking off his shirt. R.A. Dickey had spent almost an entire day in January flying halfway around the world to arrive in Tanzania. He couldn't see Mount Kilimanjaro in the darkness, all 19,341 feet of her to conquer, so Dickey stripped off his top to feel just that much closer to his latest adversary.

R.A. Dickey threw his first of three June complete games on June 2 against St. Louis (Getty)He'd read "Snows of Kilimanjaro" early in his teenage years. Hemingway spoke to Dickey. The opening image of a frozen leopard carcass felt mystical. One day, he told himself, he would go there. Marriage and children and his career as a baseball player always kept him from making the trip. Now life was different. Finally different. And it was time.

A career with no hope had found traction thanks to a pitch every bit as magical as that leopard, the knuckleball. Dickey survived more than a decade in the major leagues without

This divorce went like all the others with the Boston Red Sox: ugly, vitriolic, rotten to the core. Not even a great moment like the standing ovation Fenway Park fans gifted Kevin Youkilis following the last at-bat of his Red Sox career could mop away the feeling that it didn't have to be this way.

Only maybe a new line of thinking is necessary. Maybe it does have to be this way. The reason Boston is the greatest place in the world to play and the worst place in the world to play is that there is no gray with the Red Sox. They are the best or the worst, playing like the '27 Yankees or the '03 Tigers, with the most brilliant manager or the most incompetent. And for someone like Youkilis, who has spent his entire career with the organization, such certitudes breed deep emotions.

Kevin Youkilis tripled before leaving his final game with the Red Sox. (AP)Pour that into a carafe and add a few dashes of ego and pride, and it's a cocktail more Molotov than palatable. Even if Red Sox manager Bobby Valentine had handled Youkilis' situation with care – and he

Major League Baseball did not grow into an $8 billion business over the last two decades without burying some bodies along the way. There's a mass grave in Iowa. Plenty more scattered throughout Las Vegas. A few in North Carolina. Some in Buffalo. Lots strewn about Canada. Everywhere in Hawaii. That was the price for baseball fattening itself on television money: poor fans who just want to watch a ballgame but can't because of MLB's greed and gluttony.

Here we are. Still. Years later. It's 2012. We can watch anything we want anywhere we want on any device we want at any time we want. Except baseball games. If you live in Iowa, you can't see the Brewers, Cardinals, Cubs, Royals, Twins or White Sox. It's just as ugly in Vegas: no A's, Angels, Diamondbacks, Dodgers, Giants or Padres. Baseball continues to black out televised games in these areas because of territorial-rights rules conceived when TV was black and white and people actually watched commercials.

And it's more evident

Roger Clemens proclaimed his innocence Monday afternoon, and unlike so many things he has said during the sordid, sad end of his career, this was true. Clemens was innocent, on all six counts levied against him by the government, which through its equally repugnant zealotry turned a cheater into a martyr.

An emotional Roger Clemens addressed the crowd after the verdicts were read. (AP)"It is a beautiful day," brayed Rusty Hardin, Clemens' lawyer, and indeed it was, because for the rest of his life Clemens can utter the following: "I'm innocent." Of what it doesn't matter. Hardin tried to conflate the verdict with Clemens never having used steroids or human growth hormone, and Clemens' family nodded along behind him, and some lady kept mouthing, "That's right, that's right," like it actually was, when the entire charade was anything but right.

Just because the government chose to hand Clemens a life preserver doesn't render void the overriding fact in this case: Not guilty of perjury is not the same as never took performance-enhancing drugs.

Of course, that's

Players began voting their peers into the All-Star game 10 years ago, an idea borne of managerial nepotism run amok. Baseball tries to salvage its Midsummer Classic with new ideas like a balding man does his hairline. Spray it, toupee it, Propecia it, comb it over – do what you will, but it's still a shell of its former self.

Mike Trout is hitting .373 in June. (Getty Images)Once the All-Star game started taking itself too seriously – or rather once Bud Selig tried to force us to take it seriously by tying its results to home-field advantage in the World Series – so much of its allure began to rot. The rosters expanded. Players began skipping the game just because. The rosters expanded more. Teams complained about their pitchers throwing one measly inning, so new rules prohibited ones who started the Sunday before the game from pitching. The rosters expanded like they'd been dosed with growth hormone.

All of which is to say: Anything that can bring delight back to the All-Star game is welcome and encouraged. And it brings us to

Justin Morneau, who less than a year ago couldn't play baseball because his brain refused to let him, is dissatisfied. He is dissatisfied with his team's record, dissatisfied with his statistics and dissatisfied with where he is right now in baseball, all of which stands to reason until remembering that little fact about his brain, and that he very easily could be spending his days at home instead of in a Minnesota Twins uniform.

Justin Morneau strokes a single in a May 28 game against Oakland. (AP)This should be gravy. It's not, of course. It can't be. This is where athletes are different. The achievements, the failures. The highs, the lows. They operate on extreme scales. And whereas a return to normal life – no headaches, no vertigo, no nausea, no mental lapses – represents a normal goal for those who have suffered multiple concussions like Morneau, normalcy is not something to which he aspires. He was special. He was different. He believes he again can be special and can be different.

Slugging almost .500, popping 10 home runs, crushing

KANSAS CITY, Mo. – Nobody does honest like Zack Greinke. Because modern athletes have conditioned us to expect canned analysis, hollow words and cadaverous personalities, there is something so satisfying in somebody unburdened by what others might think. Greinke's specific brand of truth is cold and unfiltered, nothing sacred, be it cows, people or even himself.

Greinke placed Greinke under a microscope Tuesday night. He had just thrown seven brilliant innings for the Milwaukee Brewers in a 2-1 loss to the Kansas City Royals, the team he forced to trade him less than two years earlier. It was his return to the city he disowned. Rather than avoid his dirty deed – the trade request in baseball is the domain of those considered spoiled and Derek Bell's brilliant Operation Shutdown – Greinke addressed it with searing forthrightness, especially for someone who could have a nine-figure payday awaiting him once he hits free agency this offseason.

Zack Greinke served one up to Royals leadoff hitter Alex Gordon. (Getty Images)"I was pretty rude on the way out," he