Baseball and its Farce Numbers

Baseball, it’s a game of numbers.

Decibels shake stadiums in October. Tendencies suggest when to pinch hit whom. Inches separate a home run from out three. But numbers, they are what ascend the daily diamond dazzlers into celestial gods.

Bob Gibson earned 1.19. Cal Ripken Jr. lasted 2,632. Roger Maris slugged 61. Hank Aaron souveniered 755. Oral Hershiser perfected 59. Man and number, hand in hand, enshrined forever.

But then the summer of ’98 happened: Shock and awe.

Sammy Sosa (66) and Mark McGwire (70) swing their way past Maris’s 61. Just four years after the cancellation of the World Series that saw the sport’s fan appeal sink to an all-time low, baseball is resurrected and the burly, brawny ballplayers are crowned its saviors.

Nothing gold can stay.

Amid steroid allegations, the numbers have since become statistics without rank. McGwire’s 70 and Sosa’s 66 are not numbers but measurements of what the body can accomplish when pushed with science.

Altogether, 61 was passed six times between 1998 and 2001 (thrice by Sosa, twice by McGwire, and once by Barry Bonds). It was passed six times, but still it has never been matched.

While there has been little concrete proof of doping between the three record breakers, let’s for a second assume what everyone suspects to be true: McGwire, Sosa, and Bonds are among the countless baseball players who have doped heavily within the past decade. How should we look at the artificial numbers they produced in comparison to the natural numeric landmarks they surpassed?

Some will maintain, “Steroids weren’t banned when McGwire, Sosa, and Bonds passed Maris. It was part of the game, so the records should stand.” Well, it’s not that simple. Ethics never is.

With performance enhancers, you gain an edge over every player in the dugout across from you. With each dose, it becomes increasingly less difficult to reciprocate the monster stats of the gods before you. With your stats comes fame, followed closely behind by fortune. While not legitimate, what you’re doing isn’t banned, so you rightly reap the benefits.

Take it all. Take you’re all-star games. Take your endorsements. Take your lucrative contracts. But once you take that first dose, you will never be able touch Maris or Aaron in the record book. You either put up scientific measurements or you put up natural numbers, and you cannot have it both ways.

But presently, Bonds is looking to do just that as he closes in on Aaron’s 755. After he emphatically passed Maris with 72 in 2001, he’s been looking to take baseball’s most treasured number, a number that was said to be unsurpassable, and smear it in disgrace. He doesn’t care about the game or the purity of its foundation. He cares about sticking it to all the sports writers who interrogate him after the game only to tear him apart in the next morning’s newspaper. He cares about sticking it to the swarm of anti-Barry baseball fans who boo him from the stands each time he steps up to the plate.

I could go all day speculating about Bonds’ use of performance enhancers. I could speculate that he was relatively clean for the first four months of the 2006 season when he batted just .240 with 14 home runs in 229 at bats. I could speculate that he, realizing he was off his two-year pace of passing Aaron’s mark, reverted back to using an untestable human growth hormone, and that is what accounted for the 42-year old’s midseason second-wind that saw him hit .319 with 12 home runs in the final 138 at-bats of the season. I can speculate all of this because I can’t rationalize anything about this man since 2001. When coupling the era he played in with the inverse fluctuation of his stats and appearance relative to his age, there is no way you can.

That being said, Barry Bonds was a hell of a ballplayer before the steroid era: a Cooperstown shoo-in. Unfortunately, he has become—and deservedly so—the tragic anti-hero of the sport’s times, the poster child for what once happened when science took baseball by storm.

When Ryan Howard hit what appeared to be a natural 58 home runs this year, it finally looked as though there was hope to restore credibility between baseball and its numbers. Is this the end of the storm or just the eye of the hurricane? Only time will tell.

Baseball, it’s a game of wariness.

Although Barry Bonds could not be reached for comment for this story, Michael Gehlken can. Email him at michael.gehlken@gmail.com if you want to talk HGH and numbers.