Next to the achievements of Barry Bonds, Sammy Sosa and a host of prodigious sluggers, this may not seem like much of a feat. But Daubach is only the fifth Red Sox player in history to hit more than 20 home runs in each of his first three major-league seasons. He joins four of the most storied hitters in a century of Boston baseball tradition: Ted Williams, perhaps the greatest of the modern hitters; Tony Conigliaro, the youngest home-run champ in history whose career was cut short by a tragic beaning; Jim Rice, a three-time home-run champion, and Nomar Garciaparra, a two-time batting champion. Neither of the last two Red Sox hitters enshrined in Cooperstown, Carl Yasztremski or Carlton Fisk, made that list.
The point of this yarn is not to celebrate the prowess of Daubach. It is rather to show how incredibly depreciated the home run has become. Back when Babe Ruth hit 60, Daubach’s total would have ranked him third in the American League behind Ruth and Lou Gehrig. Even 34 years later, when Roger Maris belted 61, Daubach would still have been the leading home-run hitter on three American League teams. This year, the year of Barry Bonds, Daubach, for all his illustrious company in Sox history, ranks near the very bottom of American League first basemen and may not have hit enough to assure his starting position next year. If 21 home runs aren’t sufficient to keep a job, then what exactly is the measure of 69, 70, or even 71 in today’s game?
I interrupt this scholarly and dispassionate dissertation on the home run to anticipate your objection. You’re saying, “Hey, you’re just bent out of shape because you and the rest of the media can’t stand Barry Bonds.” Hey, you’re absolutely right. We were willing to join in the plaudits for Mark McGwire, a sensitive soul who crusades on behalf of abused children, as well as for Sammy Sosa, an effusive, joyous fellow. But we make no allowances for the sullen, selfish, self-involved, slugging Giant. And believe me, he is at least as unpopular with his teammates as he is with the press. A record-breaking home run would be the one most everyone remembers. But the one I’ll never forget was Bonds’s 500th career dinger early this season, when his teammates sat on their hands and Barry had to settle for a congratulatory handshake from the batboy.
OK, back to the dispassionate. McGwire’s mark came after Maris’s record had stood for 37 years, three more than the duration of Ruth’s standard. And baseball, still reeling from its ugly labor wars, desperately needed the emotional balm that McGwire’s and Sosa’s record chase provided. Bonds’s simply comes too soon for us not to acknowledge that baseball’s most hallowed record has been sadly cheapened. And while this country is obviously in urgent need of some healing in the wake of the Sept. 11 tragedy, a baseball milestone, however compelling, just isn’t momentous enough to stand as a counterpoint to that horror.
Even at my old-fogiest and most curmudgeonly, I won’t deny that Bonds is a great ballplayer having an extraordinary season. But there are a host of explanations, both positive and negative, that have contributed to a current spate of home-run records. (There were many lesser home-run marks this year, like Alex Rodriguez’s single-season record for shortstops, Sosa becoming the first player to top 60 three times and several players, like the Dodgers’ Shawn Green, setting all-time team marks.) They include: better bats; livelier balls; new launching pads that pose as ballparks, like Enron in Houston and Coors in Denver; better-conditioned players; lousy pitching, resulting from both overexpansion and the fact that baseball no longer has a stranglehold on the ambitions of this nation’s finest athletes, and the proliferation of performance-enhancers, legal and otherwise, in sports.
Unlike three years ago, when one of my unseemly colleagues snooped in McGwire’s locker and discovered the legal muscle-booster, creatine, there is no evidence that Bonds is anything but a natural wonder. (And if there were any such evidence in his locker, no reporter could get close enough, through his personal staff and entourage, to discover it anyway.) But athletes, as the greatest of them all, Michael Jordan, is about to learn, don’t peak in their late 30s. During those years generally regarded as peak-a-ges 26 through 33–Bonds averaged an estimable 36 home runs a season. He hit a career-high 49 last year, when he turned 36, and, this season at age 37, has dwarfed that number.
That surely is a tribute to Bonds, who is a superbly conditioned athlete. He can’t be faulted for taking full advantage of the homer-happy scenario that is now at the very heart of the game. That scenario is no accident. When baseball appeared to be losing its hold on the younger generation, its brass decided that home-run fireworks–along with stadium fireworks to celebrate home runs–was the key to luring kids to the ballpark. They may have been right. But it’s gone way too far. Two men reached 60 home runs in more than a century. Then three guys do it six times in just four seasons. Our “national pastime” has been transformed into a real-life version of a videogame, cheapening the greatest thing about baseball–its glorious history and traditions.
Next year some scrubbini in the thin air of Colorado will probably blast 80. And don’t think it can’t happen. Luis Gonzalez was a classic journeyman, who averaged 13 home runs through eight seasons before joining Arizona, his fourth team, at age 30. This season, while turning 34, he has already slugged 56. Bonds never managed 50 until this season, so just imagine what Gonzalez might do when he gets a little older. But before that happens, please baseball, put a stop to this madness. Raise the pitching mound, move back the fences, deaden the ball a tad and try to recall that the most exciting game of the year was the Yankees against the Red Sox, with Mike Mussina flirting with history and David Cone dueling him zero for zero.
One other thing to remember: the asterisk that came in so handy back in 1961. That’s when you didn’t care to rub out Ruth’s name from the record book. So you acknowledged Maris’s 61 with a carping * because his record had come in a 154-game season rather than the 152 of Ruth’s era. So why not get a couple ** ready–one for McGwire and another, if needed, for Bonds. It’s not because they play 162 games now; it’s that the game is not remotely the same.
