Won't Anyone Please Think of the Numbers
Barry Bonds has not yet hit a home run this season, but he will. And pretty soon he'll get the seven he needs to pass Babe Ruth (714) on the all-time homer list and start his climb toward Hank Aaron's 755. This, if you ask the game's caretakers, is a disaster for everyone involved. A couple of enterprising reporters have proven that Bonds used an astounding cocktail of performance-enhancing drugs to start this late-career power surge. The baseball establishment has ignored this until now, when it's signature record is suddenly in danger of being eclipsed.
MLB can't have it both ways. MLB's owners were printing money when guys were injecting themselves with designer drugs, fertility treatments and mongoose semen in order to develop the power to crush baseballs. Some have recently suggested that they wipe out the records from this era. Malcolm Gladwell has suggested sending in a team of forensic economists to examine the accomplishments of players past. This is slightly more creative than baseball's usual method of approaching existential crises, which is asking George Will to decide. But you can't really call a do-over now, and say that everything that happened since 1995 shouldn't count. It doesn't work like that. Not unless the owners plan to refund the money they made during those years, from both fans and television networks. Not unless the teams that won World Series during those years plan to give their trophies and rings back. And even then it wouldn't do anything. When the Michigan basketball program was found guilty of violating recruiting rules to land the famous Fab Five, the university had to take down its old hoops banners, erase the wins from its record books and return tournament money to the NCAA. But everyone still remembers Chris Webber calling time-out against North Carolina.
Record books don't need to be protected, they just need to be understood.
Baseball fans have emotional connections to 714, or .406 because they see them as records of brilliance. But they are just digits. And without context this is just an episode of Lost. Numbers don't lie, they just answer the questions they are asked. So if you make list of the top-1o home run hitters in major-league games, the top-1o against integrated pitching staffs and top-10 without suspicision of performance enhancing drugs, you get three different lists. And honestly, if you go back in time, you can't really prove that Aaron wasn't on amphetamines or that Ruth and his contemporaries weren't injecting themselves with cameleopard feces (It was a long time ago after all) because it gave them some added pep after long train rides.
The argument for asterisks or expunging homers is that Bonds (or Maris or whoever you're asterisking) doesn't deserve to be an all-time record holder for whatever reason. That may well be true. But it's the wrong question. The records are measures of the past performance not rewards. And the record book actually belongs to Major League Baseball (which is 130 years old). The historical comparisons are part of the draw of the sport. The people in charge of protecting the "sanctity of the game" spent a decade ignoring the fact that chemists could make a mockery the past numbers. MLB's management can feel remorse for this, but it can't fix this particular failure after the fact.
MLB can't have it both ways. MLB's owners were printing money when guys were injecting themselves with designer drugs, fertility treatments and mongoose semen in order to develop the power to crush baseballs. Some have recently suggested that they wipe out the records from this era. Malcolm Gladwell has suggested sending in a team of forensic economists to examine the accomplishments of players past. This is slightly more creative than baseball's usual method of approaching existential crises, which is asking George Will to decide. But you can't really call a do-over now, and say that everything that happened since 1995 shouldn't count. It doesn't work like that. Not unless the owners plan to refund the money they made during those years, from both fans and television networks. Not unless the teams that won World Series during those years plan to give their trophies and rings back. And even then it wouldn't do anything. When the Michigan basketball program was found guilty of violating recruiting rules to land the famous Fab Five, the university had to take down its old hoops banners, erase the wins from its record books and return tournament money to the NCAA. But everyone still remembers Chris Webber calling time-out against North Carolina.
Record books don't need to be protected, they just need to be understood.
Baseball fans have emotional connections to 714, or .406 because they see them as records of brilliance. But they are just digits. And without context this is just an episode of Lost. Numbers don't lie, they just answer the questions they are asked. So if you make list of the top-1o home run hitters in major-league games, the top-1o against integrated pitching staffs and top-10 without suspicision of performance enhancing drugs, you get three different lists. And honestly, if you go back in time, you can't really prove that Aaron wasn't on amphetamines or that Ruth and his contemporaries weren't injecting themselves with cameleopard feces (It was a long time ago after all) because it gave them some added pep after long train rides.
The argument for asterisks or expunging homers is that Bonds (or Maris or whoever you're asterisking) doesn't deserve to be an all-time record holder for whatever reason. That may well be true. But it's the wrong question. The records are measures of the past performance not rewards. And the record book actually belongs to Major League Baseball (which is 130 years old). The historical comparisons are part of the draw of the sport. The people in charge of protecting the "sanctity of the game" spent a decade ignoring the fact that chemists could make a mockery the past numbers. MLB's management can feel remorse for this, but it can't fix this particular failure after the fact.
0 Comment(s):
