baseball questions

[TQM]

What would you value more:

1. Maris' 61st home run ball or McGwire's 70th or Bonds' 73rd?

2. In your heart of hearts, who is the real single season home run champion?

3. In your heart of hearts, who is really the all time career home run champion - Aaron or Bonds?

Perhaps more than any other sport, baseball enshrines individual statistics. If you answer as I suspect (most of) you will, you'll be able to measure the extent of the damage done by McGwire's and Bond's use of steroids.

There are other cheaters in the Hall of Fame, I know. Gaylord Perry made frequent use of his spit, for instance, and yet he's in the Hall. But how would you feel if he had surpassed Nolan Ryan's single season or career records in strikeouts? Would you see it as a good thing or would you see it as damaging?

 

[Herodotus]

For me, this is always a difficult question, because you are comparing different eras against each other.

For example, until 1947 baseball was a whites-only game - although realistically, it took until the 1960s for integration to fully take effect. So you had a couple of generations of great African-American ballplayers whose records are not a part of official baseball history. How many homers would Josh Gibson have hit? How many RBIs would Buck Leonard have? How many wins and strikeouts would Satchel Paige have ended up with?

There were also various "dead ball" and "live ball" eras where numbers seemed to favour either pitchers or hitters.

On top of that, we have no idea the extent of steroid usage in baseball - when it started, how many players were involved and how will they detect drugs like HGH and BALCO-style designer steroids in the future.

I look at each individual's career for what it is - Barry Bonds was a first-ballot Hall-of-Famer even before the alleged drug use, so I am less offended by his breaking Henry Aaron's record than a one-dimensional juice-head like McGwire. But that's just me. We also have to consider the fact that the steroid users were not just hitters - so it was a "level" playing field in that respect as well I suppose - juicers vs. juicers, so to speak.

Again, we don't know the exact numbers - but considering the Mitchell report came up with 85 or so names and was centred almost entirely in New York and San Francisco/Oakland, I'd have to say that it may be safe to assume that at least 50% of MLB players used performance enhancing drugs. So does that mean that it was "fair" from a statistical analysis standpoint?

On that note, if it's been proven that Bonds did in fact use PEDs over a prolonged period of time, then we have to look at Hank Aaron as the Home Run King until we know the facts of the Steroid Era.

Wishy-washy, but it's the unfortunate reality of a numbers-driven game.

 

[bobistheowl]

A big difference between McGwire and Bonds is that McGwire is not known to have ingested any substances that were banned by MLB at the time. If his accomplishements were aided by artificial proteins of any kind, blame Baseball for not having banned them before he used them.

 

[maurice93]

A big difference between McGwire and Bonds is that McGwire is not known to have ingested any substances that were banned by MLB at the time. If his accomplishements were aided by artificial proteins of any kind, blame Baseball for not having banned them before he used them.

There was no steroid policy in 2001 either when Bonds hit his record #73. So much for that point.

 

[TQM]

Follow up for all of you....

Market economy questions:

If you owned both baseballs, what would you get more money for at an international auction - Maris' 61st or Bond's 73rd?

 

[Herodotus]

Market economy questions:

If you owned both baseballs, what would you get more money for at an international auction - Maris' 61st or Bond's 73rd?

Maris'.