Will baseball do anything if it can be proven that McGwire and Bonds were both juicing up when they broke the HR record?
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How would it be proven? Canseco’s book wouldn’t count as proof; it may be true but I have trouble trusting the source. Even then I’m not sure what reasons the MLB would give for singling those two out, since other players from the same time were surely doing steroids as well (the article names others implicated by Canseco).
I don’t believe Canseco any further than I can throw him.
But having said that, there wasn’t any rule against steroids in 1998 or 2001, so far as I am aware, so why would you need an asterisk? Roger Maris was on uppers half the year in 1961 (like a lot of players then) and we don’t asterisk his record for that.
Do steroids help you hit homers? Probably. But a baseball record is exactly what that word implies, a record. It’s a fact of history. The most home runs ever hit in a regular season in the major leagues is 73, by Barry Bonds in 2001. That’s simply a fact, one utterly beyond dispute. Whether his 73 homers is a more impressive athletic feat than Babe Ruth’s 60, or Maris’s 61, or Gavy Cravath’s 24 in 1915, is a debate that can be taken way beyond the raw numbers. How do you account for steroids or uppers? What about the relative difficulty of hitting homers in the times they played in? What about accounting for Babe Ruth not having to play against black players?
Here, watch this: I say Mike Schmidt’s 48 homers in 1980 is more impressive than Bonds’s 73. Consider this; in 2001, the AVERAGE National League team belted 185 homers. Astounding homer totals were the norm. In 1980, the average National League team hit just 104 homers. In context, Schmidt’s homers were substantially more out of whack with the rest of his league than Bonds’s. Schmidt hit 46%, almost half, of the number of homers that an entire TEAM would hit. Bonds hit 39.5%, a significantly smaller number. Schmidt hit 37% more homers than any other player in his league (Bob Horner hit 35.) Bonds, only 14% more (Sammy Sosa hit 64, and Luis Gonzalez was closer to Bonds than Horner to Schmidt, too.) By any comparitive measure, Schmidt’s homer display is actually further beyond his competition than Bonds’s.
Now, I have just constructed a logical, fact-based argument that Mike Schmidt’s 48-homer season is a greater accomplishment than Barry Bonds’s 73-homer season. But the fact remains that 73 homers, not 48, is the single season record.
You can do this for ANY record, any number of ways; I can very reasonably argue that the record for doubles in a season (67, by Earl Webb in 1931) should have an asterisk because Webb was playing in a segregated league. Should we do that, or just accept that all it means is a statement of absolute fact; that Earl Webb hit 67 doubles in 1931 and no major league player has ever hit more?
Schoenfield, half-jokingly, asterisks every player who hit 50 or more homeruns to leave these 3. No black players, steroids, expansion years, etc.
Earl Webb’s record for doubles in a season should be taken away because he’s such an obscure player! Accounts of his play well after the fact claimed that Webb would pass up easy triples to make sure he got a double. He had just 3 in 1931.
Sure they could. Of course, at this late date about the only way it could be proven these gentlemen were juicing up was if the admitted it on live TV. I doubt they’d do that.
No. You must remember that steroid testing in MLB didn’t begin until 2003. It can be supposed, then, that steroid were “legal” in MLB until then, even though illegal by U.S. law and other athletic oversight committees (i.e. the NFL, Olympic Committee). What should be asterisk’d is all the p*ssy pitchers to IBB Bonds in 2k4, steroids or not.