"Jim Thome belongs to a bygone era, when farm boys played in the big leagues, when travel was by train, when players got big only on hotdogs and beer, and when they were bound in servitude to the same team for their entire career.

The servitude part might have been fine with Thome. He once said they would have to rip the Indians uniform off his back -- before taking, under heavy pressure from the players union, an outlandish free-agent offer from Philadelphia. That has hurt him forevermore in Cleveland, particularly after the Indians made a big, showy public relations gesture of an offer when they knew it was too late in 2003.

Now 40 years old and 264 home runs, four teams and nine seasons removed from an Indians franchise he helped to reach two World Series, Thome came to the Minnesota Twins' weekend series at Progressive Field on the verge of joining the "600 Club" in career homers, just two away entering Saturday night.

Only seven men in history have hit 600 or more homers, and the only certifiably clean ones as far as steroid abuse goes are the old timers, Hank Aaron, Babe Ruth and Willie Mays. Ken Griffey Jr. is widely thought to have been clean; Alex Rodriguez is an admitted user in the past; and Barry Bonds and Sammy Sosa are even more widely presumed to have been dirty.

So Thome stood both on the brink of history and of suspicion. The former he earned, the latter he did not.

As in track and field with doping, so with baseball: Awe yields to doubt. Genuine accomplishments are more tainted than they would have been had a ball-and-chain of asterisks clattered after them. It is hard to prove a negative, that Thome did not take steroids. That is particularly true because his body thickened during his first years with the Tribe.

The rebuttal is to look at a photo of a Thome family reunion. They are all big men and women. His father, Chuck Jr., all but tanned the leather covers of pristine white softballs with his bat on the playing fields of Peoria, Ill. His aunt, Carolyn, was such a prospect that the hometown Caterpillar Tractor Co. gave her a mail room job at the age of 15 so she could slug away for their women's team, the Dieselettes."