Asterisks Dept.

A brief note on continuity and baseball statistics, occasioned by Adam’s post about the ambiguity of football jersey history after steroids: Remember 1987? Brook Jacoby—Brook Who?—hit thirty-two home runs. Wade Boggs, never before a slugger, hit twenty-four. The next season, they hit nine and five, respectively. The game’s self-appointed custodians that year whispered about juiced balls, not juiced bodies, but was it any less a disruption of the perceived natural order? More home runs were hit, per game, in 1987 than in 1998, the year, now tarnished in so many fans’ memories, of McGwire and Sosa.

I understand the concerns, on both aesthetic and medical grounds, about what has become of baseball in the last two decades. What I don’t really understand is the notion that our statistical record is now suddenly unmoored, adrift from a steady and relatable progression. What has ever been steady about it? Consider the Cy nba jerseys Young Award: named after a pitcher who once won twenty-one games while striking out only eighty-eight batters, and who sometimes allowed more unearned runs, in a season, than the aces of today may in their entire careers. Young, of course, pitched in the so-called Dead Ball Era, whose statistical distortions make the Steroid Era seem like a mere rounding error. Yet even thirty-five years ago a middle-of-the-rotation kind of guy might have been expected to log more complete games than last year’s Cy Young honorees had wins.

Cy Young, among his many records, won a hundred and ninety-two games with the Boston Red Sox, a distinction he shares, fittingly, with Roger Clemens. There’s a nice symmetry in this tie between a dead-ball pitcher and an allegedly steroidal pitcher. But watch out, because here comes Tim Wakefield, now forty-three and fitfully knuckleballing his way into contention, with a hundred and seventy-five Boston wins. Should Wakefield hang on long enough to claim the title—and count me among the many fans who are rooting for him—it won’t make him the best Red Sox pitcher, not by a soccer jerseys long shot. But it would be wicked cool, as the Fenway faithful might say, and a reminder that the meaning of records, like knuckleballs, can be hard to locate at any given time. The fun is in the elusiveness.