Home Run Kings?

You're comparing a baseball player to a drugdealing bankrobber? ... Perspective 4, Petty 3. ;D

 

you condone honoring a man whose feet have grown 2 1/2 sizes since his rookie year?

petty <and don't forget the freakin' heartbreakers> 5, lack of perspective 4.

 

Nope, never said I will honor it.

Read my post from yesterday. I said:

It happened; therefore, I will recognize it. Doesn't mean I will respect it.

In fact, it makes me respect Aaron and Maris more because after having living through the last 11 years of baseball, I consider what they did to be ... unfuckingpossible. My mind can't even comprehend the improbability of what they did, and I will be eagerly awaiting for the rest of my life to see if anyone else can match the sheer human achievement of 755 or 61. I don't consider 70/73 or the impending 756 to be quite on the same level of those feats on the scale of stretching the limits of human athletic capacity, all things considered.

But I'm not going to pretend like they didn't happen. The records are what they are. How I perceive them, of course, is a different matter altogether.

 

In that context, it's the same way I look at Cy Young's 511 wins. That record is untouchable, similar to how I feel 73 home runs will probably never be topped again. And certainly not by legit means.

But Warren Spahn's 363 wins are more impressive to me than Young's 511, regardless of who holds the record.

I respect Spahn's achievement more, because it came in a much different era, under much different circumstances.

Just like I respect Roger Maris' 61 a lot more than I'll ever respect McGwire's 70 or Bonds' 73, regardless of who holds the record.

 

didn't see yesterday's post dog, but i think you make your point clear with this previous response.

so here's what i will add, and get to the end before you hit the post button: i don't recognize that a car thief is an owner of a porsche, much like i won't (personally) recognize the day when bonds hits 756.

yes bonds will have hit the HRs and broke the record, much like the car thief will drive the porsche around until he gets busted and the porsche is taken from him.

bonds will have stolen that record just as much as the car thief stole the porsche. but neither one of them, in no manner, own what's in their possession. i simply choose to repossess and you don't.

for me, what bonds has done is just as bad as betting on the game. fuck, the 1919 sox coulda said: "a ton of MLBers were tanking games for money when we did it. what did we do that was so wrong?" but they didn't. they simply knew it was wrong. bonds knows it's wrong, too.

fuck him dude. i won't recognize a cheater.

 

Problem with that, of course, is: How many cheaters we gonna run off? Where do we draw the line?

Ragu gets on my case when I bring up Gaylord Perry, who cheated his way to 300 wins and a spot in the Hall of Fame. Perry admitted that he flagrantly and blatantly broke the rules -- hell, he glorifies in it and profits off it now, and baseball looks the other way just like it always does. Perry gets a hearty laugh from all when he wears his special 8-team uniform to all the Old Timers' Games and he probably gets a lifetime pass to any MLB game he wants to attend and a spot on the podium in Cooperstown every July.

Ragu compares Perry's jaywalking to Bonds' grand theft auto, and I do think he has a valid point there. There is certainly a degree of difference there.

But by how much? Where do we draw the line -- and on what grounds?

It seems kind of arbitrary to me if we burn Bonds at the stake for cheating his way to the single-season home run record (and possibly the career home run record), while Perry gets a pat on the back and "hey, you sure fooled us, you sneaky lil' blankety-blank!" for cheating his way to one of the top 20 win totals in the entire history of the game?

What makes Bonds so damn special?

Why are those particular chemicals so offensive to our sensibilities -- but there's no outrage for all the illegal amphetamines ("performance-enhancing," by any common-sense definition of the word) that Jim Bouton and Co. swallowed down four decades ago?

***

I don't think "repossessing" is the right comparison here, or the right answer. Yeah, you can give that Porsche back to its rightful owner. But he's not going to forget that it was stolen. It's not going to turn back the clock and erase it like it didn't happen.

We can reset the home-run record to 61 any time now. But I'm pretty damn sure my eyes saw somebody hit 73 home runs one year, legit or not. And no amount of "repossessing" is going to change what I know happened. I think it's a flawed strategy, and an Orwellian one.

Better to see that number 73 for what it is ... respect the hell out of 61 for what it is ... and work on changing the game for the future to ensure that, in the immortal words of Pete Townshend, we won't get fooled again.

 

buck - i choose to draw the line at those who steal the porsche and drive it into the winner's circle.

aaron and maris are the porsche owners ... give them back the fucking car they spent years legally buying.

i can live with bret boone, but i won't apologize for not being able to live with bonds.

 

So if Bonds hits 754, you're OK with that? But if he hits 756, you're not?

Again, where does the line get drawn?

Do we draw it just for record-setters, meaning Luis Gonzalez can have as many 57-HR seasons as he wants as long as he doesn't hit 61?

Do we draw it just for home runs, or are we going to look at other records, too? What about for pitchers? Where do we draw the line for them?

Or is it just ... "I know it when I see it," which is what most of us already use to base our judgments on right now? Because then I say, to each his own, leave the numbers where they are and use your own standards to assign honor and respect to Bonds or Aaron or Clemens or Perry's achievements ... see those "records" for what they are, and how they were made.

But you can't give it back -- you can't erase the past. What happened, happened, and it's done now. It's over. Nobody can say that Maris hit more home runs in one season than anyone in history, because we all saw Bonds hit more home runs in one season than anyone in history. He did, I swear I saw it. And so did you. Ignoring that is worse than condoning it.

Bonds was wrong. But so was baseball. And baseball deceived us just as much as Bonds did, because Selig and his cronies knew what was happening and turned a blind eye. They raked in, and Bonds raked in, and, boy, we all got fucked in the ass.

Erasing Bonds' records won't change that. And it won't right any wrongs, because it's not as simple as changing a number in a record book, and it won't make anybody feel better about what happened, either.

 

buck - that's the beauty about being me. i can do anything i want when it comes to how i view baseball and cheatin-fuckers setting records. and, baseball will never be able to erase the fact many, many guys fixed games back in the day ... but at least they kicked the guys they proved who cheated out of the fucking game. baseball refuses to do that, for now. for my money, i kick bonds out of the game.

and the thing about perry: if you were alive during the time perry was pitching, you'd know he was nothing more than entertainment. and that the bastard was under such a microscope, he never coulda hid a substance on his body. perry, much like pitchers of yesterday and today, was more about mind games than anything else. and, btw, perry didn't win 512 games AND, illegal substances probably didn't help him win a single game. but the fact he might have been hiding substances sure as to hell did.

 

and i felt remiss for not addressing this: that's like saying, that even though i think the war in iraq is wrong, i somehow should feel remorse because bush lied to us about WMD and should excuse the fact our kids are dying overseas for no reason.

obviously, the loss of life is much, much, much larger than any baseball record, but how is the logic any different?

 

Tom,
The Black Sox were caught throwing games. Bonds, though there is a concensus that he is cheating, hasn't been caught yet.

 

the black sox were found not guilty in a court of law.