Bring Back the *

The Pride of Fargo

In 1961, as Roger Maris chased Babe Ruth's sacred home run record, losing his hair from stress under the burdens of history and Mickey Mantle's popularity, I'll be he never thought that someday people would be fighting for the integrity of his record. But that's just what I'm here to do. As anybody who's watched Billy Crystal's 61* knows, the asterisk that was added to cheapen Maris's record (signifying that he set the record in a longer regular season) was removed in 1991, five years after his death.

I say it's time to bring it back. The unlikely avatar of this cause is slugger-turned-punchline, Jose Canseco. Leaked copies of his upcoming book reveal that while with the World Series champion Oakland A's, Canseco injected Mark McGwire and Jason Giambi with steroids. Now, Canseco may not have had the good sense to conceal his own steroid use, and he may be a convicted cokehead, and he may be a perennial blooper reel feature (for that time the ball bounced off his head and over the wall for a homerun), but to my knowledge he hasn't been proven a liar.

Unseemly revelations about baseball all seem to follow the same trajectory, whether it's Canseco, Bill Lee or Jim Bouton. MLB and the "upstanding" players dismiss the authors as has-beens, drum them out of baseball and cover their own asses. Would McGwire be so vigorously tut-tutting at Canseco's book and talking up his exercise regimen if he wasn't eligible for HOF membership next year? The man spent the final years of his career without a discernable neck, for gawdsakes! If he wasn't covering something up, would Tony LaRussa be so obtuse about the steroid abuse going on under his nose in Oakland? Even Jason Giambi, that paragon of clean-living, had his agent, Art Tellem, denounce Canseco. "This book, which attacks baseball and many of its players, was written to make a quick buck by a guy desperate for attention, who has appeared on more police blotters than lineup cards in recent years, has no runs, no hits and is all errors." Though it's quite a pithy little phrase, Tellem is just attacking the messenger to conceal the message. His language even smacks of the White House smear jobs on Paul O'Neill and Richard Clarke after they said what powerful people didn't want the public to hear.

I started this post talking about asterisks, so let me come to the point. If I had my druthers, next year's baseball almanac would feature the following entry for home runs in a single season: Roger Maris, 61*

*This record was passed by Mark McGwire (70), Sammy Sosa (66), and Barry Bonds (73), but as they were all chemically enhanced, and as Maris's chemical enhancement of choice was cigarettes and the occasional beer, they are not the authentic records and are thus stricken.

(Sorry about all the baseball posts, but it is only 11 days until pitchers and catchers!)