Alex Rodriguez's admission on Monday that he had used steroids has left baseball writers in something of a bind. Aside from all the moral outrage at what has come to be known as the 'steroid era' - encompassing the players, the owners, Major League Baseball, and the players union - it has led to a fundamental problem regarding the interpretation of the game's history.
Baseball is a sport which prides itself on history. More so than any other sport, it is a game of numbers. Numbers are hugely important even to those who are not statistically inclined. It's a game of twenty-seven outs organised into nine innings. Three strikes and you're out, four balls and you get a walk. It may be a cliché, but most Americans can tell you that Babe Ruth wore number 3, or that Hank Aaron hit 755 home runs, that Joe DiMaggio had a 56 game hitting streak, or that Ted Williams was the last player to have a batting average of .400. The great players have their uniform numbers retired. The truly great can hope to acquire a sufficient number of votes to gain entry to the Hall of Fame. It's a game of numbers, numbers, numbers.
The BALCO scandal began a process which is still playing out and may have a long distance left to run. Being integral to it, Barry Bonds' achievements (breaking both the single season and all time home run record) have been invalidated, even though the history books will show that he hit 73 home runs in 2001 and 762 for his career. He is due to stand trial for perjury on March 3rd for lying to a federal grand jury about intentional drug use.
Bonds was never very popular and although he trampled all over the history books, the proximity of a number of less bulky, and less obviously 'roided players to Bonds in the all time home run list meant that his record was not expected to endure. Alex Rodriguez, the prodigy who made the major leagues at the age of eighteen and who did not seem to physically change much throughout his career would break it. While A-Rod was never a popular figure - he was seen as vain and preening and a big-time choker - he was at least assumed to be clean. Hell, he didn't need steroids, or so they said (nevermind that this applied equally to Bonds. Also, lets ignore the fact that baseball's history is littered with cheats who bent the rules in a myriad of ways).
It turns out that Alex Rodriguez is another drug cheat.
People always gasped and gawked at the sudden emergence of Sammy Sosa to become a perennial 60 home run threat in the late nineties, or at the size of Mark McGwire's arms when he and Sosa went head to head for the single season home run record which had stood for 37 years in 1998. Bonds' late career power spike drew similar amazement. A-Rod never experienced this. He was a natural from the get-go, one who hit 36 home runs in his first full season in 1996 at the age of 20.
A-Rod was the saviour of baseball, the redeemer, who although lacking in charisma and public relations savvy, would at least wrench back one of the sports' most hallowed records for the good guys. That won't happen now.
A revisionist movement is suddenly under way. Nobody from the previous twenty years is above suspicion. Players who had been somewhat overlooked are now being rehabilitated on the fly.
Take Frank Thomas for example. Thomas was similar to Bonds in his career - surly, seen as a bad team-mate, and not particularly kind to the press. He won two MVPs in the early 1990s and topped 500 home runs for his career last year. He was always viewed as a borderline Hall of Fame candidate at best due to his 'character issues' and the fact that he didn't 'play' a position for large chunks of his career (being a designated hitter). Thomas was the only player who consistently spoke out against performance enhancing drugs, advocated the introduction of testing, and more importantly, was the only player in all of Major League Baseball who agreed to cooperate in full with Senator Mitchell's report into the issue. Could he be the hero?
People are looking once more to Ken Griffey Jr., the original 'natural', a lithe and athletic guy with a sweet swing who was sure to break both the single season and career home run records in the mid 90s without all that muscle. Injuries derailed his career somewhat in the late 90s and especially into the 2000s and he missed out on baseball's steroid fuelled home run binge. He has still topped 600 career home runs. Larry Stone of the Seattle Times wrote on Monday that 'Griffey will rightly emerge as the most celebrated player of his era.'
Some writers are advocating the abolition of all records set in the 'steroids era'. It is a measure of the distrust that has gripped baseball over the past five years. Nobody is above suspicion. Numbers have become meaningless. The players of the steroids era etched themselves into history and now the process of rewriting this history is beginning. The dust has yet to settle. Baseball needs to decide who its hero is going to be.
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