Life's Pleasures Quote by Harmon Killebrew

Killebrew is doing something rarer than a boilerplate anti-drug sound bite: he’s mourning a lost innocence while admitting it was, at least partly, a comforting myth. The first sentence plants the flag on “integrity,” not health. That’s a veteran’s value system: baseball isn’t just a workplace; it’s a civic ritual with rules that are supposed to mean something even when nobody’s watching. By framing doping as harm to the game’s integrity, he’s arguing that the true injury is collective. Records become less like history and more like marketing.

Then comes the quiet pivot: “We always thought we were immune.” That “we” is doing heavy lifting. It’s the clubhouse, the fans, the Hall of Fame custodians, the whole self-image of baseball as the clean, pastoral alternative to the more openly chemicalized sports. Killebrew’s subtext is that the steroid era didn’t just introduce cheating; it exposed the sport’s self-deception. “Immune” suggests a moral biology, as if baseball’s traditions could function like antibodies. The follow-up - “but we know that’s not true anymore” - lands as a reluctant concession to modernity: the game is porous, vulnerable to the same pressures of celebrity, money, and performance enhancement as everything else.

Context matters: Killebrew spoke as a revered power hitter from an earlier era, whose own numbers and legacy were suddenly being re-litigated by the inflation of the long ball. His intent isn’t to grandstand; it’s to draw a line between competition and counterfeit, and to insist that baseball’s meaning depends on the credibility of its outcomes.