How baseball can deal with home run records from the steroid era

The return of Alex Rodriguez to active duty with the Yankees this year reminds us yet again of baseball's steroid fiasco. Rodriguez is doing well enough this year that he has passed Willie Mays for fourth place on the all-time home run list.

It won't happen this year, but he has a reasonable chance to pass Babe Ruth for third place, although the top two spots still seem like a reach.

I think it would be accurate to say only a small minority of real baseball fans want to see that happen. Rodriguez has 665 career home runs as of today. It's bad enough that he passed Mays, but it would be much worse if he reaches 700 homers.

It would be very difficult to overstate how badly baseball screwed up when it came to steroids. Going all the way back to the late '80s, and then with the whole "Chicks dig the long ball" ad campaign, the people responsible for the stewardship of the game might just as well have been trying to destroy it.

Babe Ruth hit 60 home runs in 1927, and Roger Maris hit 61 34 years later.

That ought to say a lot about how difficult it was.




But starting in 1998, with baseball recovering from a disastrous work stoppage that actually saw the cancellation of the 1994 World Series, there were plenty of longballs for the chick to dig. Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa staged a battle for the record in 1998 that saw McGwire hit 70 home runs and Sosa hit 66.


They hit 65 and 63 respectively in 1999, and Sosa hit 64 two years later. That meant a player who had never hit more than 40 home runs in a season in his career had broken Maris's record three times in four years.

The biggest obscenity of all came in 2001, when "the cream and the clear" -- two types of steroids -- helped Barry Bonds hit 73 home runs at the age of 37. He had never hit 50 in a season before his record-breaking year.

If you look at the list of all-time career home run leaders, Bonds is at the top and five others linked with steroid use are in the top 14. In addition to Rodriguez (fourth), Sosa (eighth) and McGwire (10th), Rafael Palmeiro is 12th and Manny Ramirez 14th.

Oddly, two modern-era players who were never linked to steroids are sixth and seventh on the all-time list. Ken Griffey was plagued by injuries, clearly a sign he wasn't using steroids. He hit just 192 of his 630 career home runs in his last 10 years. Thome hit just 71 of his total of 612 in his final four seasons.

They're the only ones whose career trajectory seems to follow the normal rise and fall of power hitters.

Of course, the distortions caused by steroids will be with baseball forever. The names of Bonds and Rodriguez will always be at or near the top of the home run list, just as steroid user Roger Clemens will always be listed among the greatest pitchers.

So what do we do?

How do we explain the steroid era to future generations of fans?

I think there are two things to be done, one proactive and the other a little bit punitive.

First, the Veterans Committee should do something that should have been done long ago -- vote Maris into the Hall of Fame.

Houston, 2010

While it's true that his counting numbers aren't all that impressive, there are a couple of things that stand out. Maris was the American League's Most Valuable Player in both 1960 and '61. Dale Murphy is the only player I can remember who won back-to-back MVPs and didn't make the Hall of Fame.

Credit Maris also with being one of the best defensive right fielders in baseball for much of his career, and of course, there's that number.

61.

It mattered to him. He was proud of it, and it was sad how little he was allowed to enjoy it.

"The first question I got at spring training the next year was if I was going to hit 62 home runs in 1962," he told me in August 1982.

That wasn't even the dumbest question. All during 1961, writers who didn't like Maris were criticizing him for his low batting average. He hit 61 homers, but had only a .269 batting average, That same season, teammate Mickey Mantle hit 54 home runs and batted .317.

"They would ask me if I would rather hit 61 home runs or have a .300 batting average."

Maris shook his head.

"A lot of guys hit .300," he said. "Nobody else hit 61 homers."

And that was how legendary sports columnist Scott Ostler made the best case for Maris.

"Of course they can't put him in the Hall of Fame. Then they would have to let everyone who hit 61 in."

Which brings us to the second part of the solution. There are enough great players who probably won't be voted in because of steroids, but we shouldn't treat them as if they never existed. A display with photographs -- not plaques -- should mention Bonds, McGwire and all the others in a sort of Wall of Shame at the Hall of Fame.

Some of the players were just stupid to do it. Bonds would clearly have been a Hall of Famer without steroids, but he was annoyed by all the attention McGwire and Sosa received in 1998 and 1999.

McGwire, on the other hand, used illegal substances for most of his career, while Sosa was a good player but not an immortal until he started using.

It's not an ideal solution, but something like this might help baseball deal with one of its darker chapters.