ShareThisBy GERRY GOLDSTEIN
The Providence Journal
Tuesday, July 17, 2007
One used to think that the last place to find ambiguity was in baseball statistics, where accomplishment is measured and archived strictly by the numbers. This attitude changed forever in 1961, when Roger Maris supposedly obliterated the most venerated number of them all -- 60 -- Babe Ruth's "unbreakable" record for home runs in a single season.
We baseball fans revered that number; to us there was magic in it. Sixty home runs was a mark to stand forever -- a heroic milestone that conjured up misty images of a time when giants roamed the ballparks.
Little wonder that traditionalists secretly and not so secretly hoped Maris would fail in his attempt to surpass the mythological Ruth. The pressure-cooker became so intense, in fact, that clumps of Maris's hair began falling out.
We owe eternal thanks to him -- not for "breaking" Ruth's 1927 record, but for the way he did it. As even casual baseball fans know, Ruth hit his 60 in 154 games. By the time that Maris hit 61, 34 years later, the season had been expanded to 162 games -- and it wasn't until game 158 that Maris hit his 60th to "tie" the record. One might also point out that in 1961 Maris came to bat 590 times, while Ruth came up only 540 times in '27.
So, whose mark is better? We have always been able to decide for ourselves, and with dozens of other variables favoring either Ruth or Maris, there is probably no empirical answer.
One might apply the same logic to the other of Ruth's seemingly unsurpassable records -- 714 lifetime home runs -- broken by Henry Aaron, who hit 755, and, like Maris, faced considerable animosity in the doing. But again, we can thank Aaron: During his career he came to bat more than 12,000 times, nearly 4,000 times more than did Babe Ruth. So a record was broken, but in truth, an accomplishment was not necessarily diminished.
It's a peculiarity of baseball, perhaps because of its long history and the way it is burrowed into the marrow of our generations, that we are vaguely reluctant to part with its gloried superlatives.
For example, there was little, if any, nostalgic regret that day in 1954 when Roger Bannister pulled off what Forbes magazine would later call the greatest athletic achievement of all time, the running of a mile in under four minutes.
But that storied record of 3:59.4 was to endure only 46 days until John Landy bested it, and hundreds have done that since, with the current mark under 3:44.
The run on Ruth and Maris has been far less convincing, and to many of us, their benchmarks are valid still.
I use the present tense even though the single-season homer record has long been eclipsed by players with names like Bonds, McGwire and Sosa, with that selfsame Bonds poised throughout this very season to break Aaron's lifetime homer mark.
As for the Babe, if there was body-building power in the zillion hot dogs he downed in a lifetime (no doubt a record that stands), his shape didn't show it. The modern fan, though, sniffs malfeasance in the Popeye-esque physiques displayed when most of these inflated contemporary numbers piled up.
The steroid controversy, to baseball's discredit, has left us with little hard and fast to go on -- except our own observations amid stonewalling and weasel-wording that themselves add to the outrage.
We abhor it all, but it softens our disgust to know that while some of baseball's numbers are now distended, we can rightly cling to those we have always appreciated and eagerly debated: 60, 61, 714, and 755.
We'll never know how many home runs were actually hit by steroids, so today's gaudy numbers are like any of the old baseball yarns and legends: blends of truth and fiction -- and we with no way of assessing where one ends and the other begins.
Gerry Goldstein is a retired Journal editor and writer.
