Baseball is a game of numbers, though the context surrounding some of the sport’s most highly regard milestones maybe changing.
By: Hank Kalet
This has been a baseball season of milestones.
A-Rod’s 500th home run, Tom Glavine’s 300th win, Craig Biggio’s 3,000th hit milestones that, when attained, have nearly always resulted in a ticket to Cooperstown.
Few players who have attained these magical numbers have been denied entry though the rules maybe changing. Mark McGwire (eighth on the all-time home run list with 583) was denied first-ballot entry this year and others (Sammy Sosa? Rafael Palmeiro?) may find their entry blocked when the time comes.
The reason? A cloud of steroids hangs over the game that has fans and sportswriters questioning the very foundation statistics on which baseball history is built. Consider the sanctity of numbers to baseball fans:
Even Cubs fans were cheering after Sunday night’s Mets win, which gave Glavine his 300th win, making him the 23rd pitcher to reach that lofty total in history.
And when Alex Rodriguez smashed his 500th home run on Saturday, all those Yankee fans who were ready to run him out of town last year, were cheering and the sports shows were buzzing about his chances to capture the all-time home run crown.
But before he gets there, he’ll have to see where Barry Bonds ends up. The much-maligned Giants slugger cracked home run number 756 on Tuesday in San Francisco, surpassing Hall-of-Famer Hank Aaron and becoming the all-time home run king.
Much has been written about Bonds’ chase of the record, primarily because of the steroid cloud that hovers above Bonds’ head and the sport. And there are many who view what had become inevitable as a stain, many who would like to see an asterisk placed next to Bonds’ final total in the record books as a way of permanently reminding fans of the questions surrounding the last third of his career.
Baseball, perhaps more than any other sport, is a numbers game. Numbers tell the story, lend it structure, place performances in context. For many, Bonds’ home run numbers lack context or not the kind of context baseball history respects.
He hit more home runs more frequently as he got older (one every 11.7 at bats in 1993, compared with one every 8.7 at bats 10 years later), hit them in huge bunches at a time when others were suddenly and suspiciously doing the same.
Consider this: Before 1998, only two players in baseball history had hit more than 60 home runs. In 1998, both McGwire and Sosa blew past the mark, with a total of six hitters doing it between 1998 and 2001 including 73 by Bonds in 2001.
McGwire and Sosa, even at their best, were no match for Bonds as all-around players, but their power surges help place Bonds’ own homer totals in context.
As I said, McGwire failed to get into the Hall of Fame this year and may not win induction for a long time. He was considered a decent power hitter through his 20s, but became the prototypical masher late in his career. He was one of the sport’s more popular players he and Sosa’s 1998 pursuit of Roger Maris’ single-season record has been credited with saving the sport and making it attractive again for young fans until his performance at a U.S. Senate committee hearing on steroid use, when he refused to answer questions and suddenly became the poster child of everything that had gone wrong with the sport.
Two others who have passed the 500-homer plateau also may face a difficult road to the Hall: Palmeiro and Sosa. Neither player was considered a power threat until their mid- to late-20s, when they became feared sluggers. And both, like McGwire, are weighted down with suspicions of steroid use.
Palmeiro, who hit 569 homeruns in a 20-year career, wagged his finger at the same Senate committee that McGwire had approached with stony silence and later tested positive for steroid use. His chances for Hall entry when he becomes eligible in four years appear pretty slim.
Sosa, like McGwire, went from decent power threat to monster home-run hitter overnight, hitting 60 or more home runs three times in four years until his skills seemed to atrophy overnight. Nearly half of his home runs were hit in a five-year period he is in his 18th year in the big leagues a period that also corresponds to McGwire’s best stretch.
There is a double-standard in this, of course. The lords of the sport played up the power surge to sell tickets, adding a home run derby to the All-Star weekend festivities, bringing in the fences and focusing their marketing efforts on the so-called boppers.
When steroids "suddenly" appeared as an issue I place "suddenly" in quotation marks because there had been suspicions of steroid use in the game for at least a decade baseball’s owners offered their best impression of Claude Raines’ Captain Renault from "Casablanca." They were "shocked, shocked" to find that some players were looking for a chemical advantage.
It is within this context that Bonds’ pursuit of Aaron’s record took place.
And it is why, in the end, I am of two minds when it comes to Bonds. It is foolish to dismiss him out of hand, to assume that his accomplishments were all chemically induced (there remain only rumors and federal grand jury leaks, but no criminal indictment of Bonds) especially when you consider the breadth of what he has done not only in recent years, but across his career.
He would have been an automatic first-ballot Hall-of-Famer had his career ended in 1999 the year before he allegedly got involved with steroids. He’d already hit 445 home runs (more than 30 a year) and he’d won three MVPs, eight Gold Gloves and a home run crown. He’d also stolen 470 bases.
He was 34 at that point and appeared a lock to become the first player in history which, in fact, he has become to hit more than 500 home runs and steal 500 bases.
But root for Bonds? Forget about it. Even without the steroid controversy, he was a tough player to like. He has always had a reputation for being a selfish and surly player, the total antithesis of Hank Aaron, or even his contemporary Ken Griffey Jr.
Baseball may not have wanted Bonds to pass Aaron, but he has. He is the new homerun king at least until A-Rod catches him in about 10 years or so.
Hank Kalet is managing editor of the South Brunswick Post and The Cranbury Press. He can be e-mailed by clicking here. His blog, Channel Surfing, can be found at www.kaletblog.com.

