Wed, July 25, 2007

Ordinarily, I can only be bothered to really care about baseball once or twice a year. I love it in abstract terms and I never mind watching it, but I don't really care about it except at the start of the season, and maybe again at the end if the Braves are in the running (rarely, these days). But this week I care a lot about baseball – possibly more than I have in years. Barry Bonds is within inches of Hank Aaron's career record of 755 home runs.

As any hack sportswriter will tell you, it's especially important this week because the San Francisco Giants (where Bonds hangs his bat) are hosting the Atlanta Braves, the ball club which takes unofficial ownership of Hank Aaron's record since Aaron was a Brave when he bested Babe Ruth's previous record (714). There's an eatery in the Braves' home stadium called the 755 Club, even though Aaron only went up to #733 with the Braves. (He hit another 22 home runs with the Brewers before ending his playing career.) So, of course the Braves don't want to be the team to hand Bonds his new record.

No one does, really, no matter what the history. But it's apparently considered poor sportsmanship to intentionally walk Barry Bonds every time he steps to the plate, or – as I'd prefer – hit him in the face with each pitch. It's not just the usual competitive instinct: no team wants to lose the game that propels their opponent into the playoffs, even after their own post-season hopes are dashed, but Bonds is reviled by nearly everyone. For the most part, nobody wants him to achieve this record at all. Spectators boo him from the stands whenever he picks up a bat. People hate him.

I certainly hate him. I pretty much always have. I remember in the '90s when he was surrounded by charges of spousal abuse, and I went to a Giants home game with my cousins and wouldn't stop yelling about how "Bonds beats his fucking wife!" no matter how many dirty looks I got. He's a big, whiny baby; he has a stupid, monstrous elbow guard; his enormous head frightens children. He couldn't be less of a team player. Even if it weren't for the steroid scandal, I wouldn't want him anywhere near Aaron's record.

But there is the steroid scandal. And the investigation is evidently ongoing, but for some reason Bonds keeps playing baseball in the meantime. Sure, the record exists in the shadow of these allegations, and of course there will be an asterisk (whether or not it's a literal asterisk, and whether or not it would mean anything if it were). If he's proven incontrovertibly guilty sometime after he hits his 756th home run, maybe they'll even wipe it out of the record books altogether. But – as Armin Tanzarian will tell you – that's not the same as never having happened in the first place. Even though Bonds isn't officially in jail or banned from baseball over this steroid thing, it seems like everyone assumes he's guilty. There's no way it would've been talked about this long without being true. (This is the same way we know John Kerry is a coward who routinely shot Vietnamese children in the back, often while raping puppies.)

So, why don't we stop him? Why don't we force Barry Bonds to sit out every game until we've got a final answer on this thing? Why doesn't someone kill him? Why don't pitchers pitch around him for the rest of his career? Bonds is bad for baseball, and his record is even worse. Isn't it our responsibility to do something about it, for the protection of the game?

Or is it that baseball's statistics – the source of all its balance and beauty – are perfect precisely because they allow something like this to happen? Records of achievement from different eras of the game never really stack up anyway, because so many elements have changed. The pitcher's mound moved, the strike zone shrunk, and new technology crept into ball, glove, and bat design. If I understand Bill James's "lively ball" theory, it says Ruth's record might've been well below 700 if not for restrictions on pitchers in the 1920s. Are performance enhancing drugs another tilt in baseball's ever-shifting landscape? If steroids are part of the game (and no one can deny that they are) and we can't definitively say which hits, runs, or at-bats they apply to (and we sadly can't), does that mean we have to leave Bonds's record alone, even when our gut tells us it mustn't stand?

In Sherwood Kiraly's fantastic debut novel, California Rush – quite possibly the best book ever written about baseball (certainly tops in the fiction category) – he constructs an absurdly improbable game at the end of a pennant race. Things happen that theoretically never should happen in baseball, but are technically possible, according to the rules. One TV commentator says, "This is what happens when lunatics play by the rules." But the narrator is quick to defend:

Well, maybe, but if that's so, you do something about the lunatics; you don't change the rules. Baseball makes sense. It wasn't baseball's fault.

Maybe that's just it. Within the laws of baseball, something like arrogant, juiced-up, evil Barry Bonds breaking the record of sweet, noble, ancient Hank Aaron – well, that's just allowed to happen. It's undeniable that people are pitching to Bonds differently than they would to someone who wasn't chasing a personal record (and differently than they would to a record-chaser who wasn't Bonds), but in general, maybe the best anyone can do is let things play out and have faith in the restorative power of that asterisk.

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