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Meaningless milestones Numbers don't mean what they used to
Sports Illustrated's Stephen Cannella checks in with his baseball thoughts every Thursday throughout the season on CNNSI.com. A few days after swatting his 500th home run on April 17, Giants slugger Barry Bonds was asked in a TV interview to reflect on what joining that club meant for his career and his reputation. His answer: He no longer had to "explain [him]self," meaning that anyone wishing to gauge his talent, his stature and his longevity need look no further than the bottom line of his baseball card. No more caveats, no more alibis for postseason failures -- Bonds had assured himself a spot on baseball's Olympus with one swing (actually, 500 swings) of the bat. The list of players who have hit 500 homers is certainly a select one, shorter than the lists of hitters with 3,000 hits or pitchers with 300 wins. Reaching any of those marks is a testament to a player's skill and endurance. But Bonds would have been considered one of the game's all-time greats even if he had finished his career stuck at 499 homers. By the same token, all the home runs in the world don't change the fact that Bonds has yet to win a World Series and has a .196 career batting average in the postseason. That's the problem with these supposedly magical milestone numbers: They're arbitrary figures that confer mythic status upon and guarantee Hall of Fame entry to the players who reach them. "Absolute numbers are terrible for comparing players of different eras," says John Thorn, publisher of Total Baseball, the game's official encyclopedia. "The theory of relativity doesn't stop at physics. It's true for baseball, too." Not that Bonds isn't Cooperstown-bound. He'll be inducted in his first year of eligibility, and deservedly so. The point is that the game's hallmark round numbers are groundless when it comes to comparing players who competed in different eras and for different lengths of time. Take the 500-homer club. Bonds has had the benefit of playing in an offensive-boom time, when pitching has been diluted, parks have become smaller and home runs are more common than ever. It's hard to compare the degree of difficulty for the 506 homers he'd hit through Wednesday's games with that for, say, the 521 Willie McCovey tallied from 1959 to '80. There's little doubt that the 500 Club, which now has 17 members, soon won't be so elite. If they continue at their current career per-season home run rates, Ken Griffey Jr., Fred McGriff, Rafael Palmeiro, Sammy Sosa, Juan Gonzalez and Frank Thomas all will hit their 500th homers by the end of the 2006 season. Alex Rodriguez (189 homers after five full seasons) is on pace to get there by 2112. Another problem: In addition to playing under different conditions than their early-century predecessors, today's players are often chasing moving targets when they get near hallowed marks. Rickey Henderson broke Babe Ruth's career record last week with his 2,063rd walk. He would have done it last year if the Babe's total hadn't been padded with six extra bases on balls in 1999, 64 years after he'd played his last game. Cap Anson is another player who's had an active retirement. When he stopped playing in 1897 he thought he was the first player to reach the 3,000-hit mark, with a total of 3,509. When the first edition of The Baseball Encyclopedia was published in 1969, however, Anson's hit total was listed as 2,995. (He was stripped of hits he gained while playing in the National Association in the 1870s, and several hundred he had been credited with while playing for the Cubs were found to be fabrications or mistakes.) The latest edition of Total Baseball credits Anson with 3,056 hits, returning him to the 3,000-hit club. (That total incorporates 60 walks that had originally been counted as hits, as was the statistical custom of Anson's day.) However, that total differs from the 3,081 the Elias Sports Bureau, Major League Baseball's official statistician, lists for Anson. "We think history is process, not product, and that it can be re-examined to correct mistakes," says Thorn. Aside from a slight disagreement between baseball's official encyclopedia and its official statistician, we know exactly how many hits Anson had. But does it matter? In terms of historical accuracy, yes, but not when it comes to comparing players from vastly different eras. Henderson is the greatest leadoff hitter of all time, regardless of how many walks he ends up with compared to Ruth, and regardless of whether he sticks around long enough to break Ty Cobb's record for runs (he needs 63) or joins the 3,000-hit club (he needs 75). Similarly, Bonds will be considered the best all-around player of his era, but it will have nothing to do with the fact that he hit 500 home runs. Part of baseball's allure is the sport's fascination with numbers -- fans feel they can quantify every player and every action on the field. When dealing with the greats of a game with over a century of history, however, the old saying holds true: Statistics are like lampposts -- they are good to lean on, but they don't shed much light. Sports Illustrated staff writer Stephen Cannella covers the baseball beat for the magazine. Touching Base appears every Thursday on CNNSI.com. |
