Why Baseball? Redux

My old friend Ben McGrath asks if I remember 1987, a statistically bizarre baseball year; indeed, I do. The point, though, that I was football jersey making, is that 1987 is an aberration—what’s called in science an anomaly and treated as such. And, like all anomalies, it produced cognitive dissonance and weird perceptions: It even led the great Bill James to wildly, if briefly, overrate Wade Boggs, who had an atypical home-run year, which James imagined was newly typical.

What you do with an anomaly is to worry about it and then try either to explain it or adjust to it or alter it, but you deal with it; you don’t just shrug and say it happened. The juiced baseball of nba jerseys that year—since that’s what seems to have made it happen—was analyzed that winter, and was gone the next. Explain it, prevent it if you want to, or model it so that you adjust to it, but you can’t just accept it.

Nobody thinks nothing changes. Baseball in the sixties was far more of a pitcher’s game—Bob Gibson, Sandy Koufax. But you can connect with their accomplishment; they were genuinely great pitchers pitching in an unusual environment. It was an aberration that could be analyzed and adjusted for—and then, on a practical basis, altered (pitching mounds were lowered) for the good of the game. The history heals up.

The problem with the steroids era is that it is an aberration, an anomaly that, though it can be resolved technically, can’t be emotionally resolved within the system—it covers too great a period, and the problems it presents are just too big. The history doesn’t heal. The soccer uniforms discrepancies are so large that they are impossible to adjust within a normal progression of natural changes. This is not a case of someone having an atypically good season within a normal range of excellence. Mark McGwire hit seventy home runs where no one before had gotten out of the sixties; Barry Bonds broke Ruth’s record. You can’t build a bridge back to the past when two anomalies like that stand in your way—you either have to adjust to them or annihilate them. Reduce it to a simple question: Quick—is Barry Bonds the greatest player in the game or not? Obviously he is; just as obviously, a huge number of soccer jerseys serious fans, ranging from the ordinary to the obnoxious, can’t bracket him with Cobb or Ruth or Mays or Oscar Charleston. A blogger at the Bad News Cubs, writing about the juiced ball, put it well: