When we were kids, one of the books that my brother had was a collection of classic baseball stories. While he was the one with the athletic talent, I was (and still am, I suppose) the stats obsessed baseball geek who devoured all of these stories from baseball’s bygone days. The longest game, Harvey Haddix’s perfect loss, and of course, the tale of Roger Maris and the Asterisk.
For those who weren’t baseball geeks before 1998, Roger Maris was the holder of the single season home run record, having hit 61 homers during the 1961 season. This broke Babe Ruth’s record of 60 homers in a single season, which had stood since 1927. There was just one little detail. In 1927, the baseball season was 154 games. By the time Maris played, the season was up to the 162 games that we’re familiar with now (2020 season excepted).
Apocryphally, this led to Maris’s record having an asterisk attached to it to designate that it was achieved under different circumstances that Ruth’s. Specifically, the asterisk showed up when sportswriter Dick Young, at a 1961 press conference where then Commissioner Ford Frick was talking about Maris’s pursuit of the record, said “Maybe you should use an asterisk on the new record. Everybody does that when there’s a difference of opinion.” While there may, or may not have been an actual asterisk in the record books, the fact remains that the asterisk followed Maris to his grave.
None of which really matters to the modern baseball record books. Both Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa smashed the 61 homer record during their 1998 season, with Sosa hitting 66, and McGwire accounting for an unbelievable 70. Both players were also certainly cheating with PEDs. McGwire has admitted to it, and while Sosa has never admitted it, it’s one of those things that everyone knows, even if it hasn’t been officially acknowledged.
But all of that is just a stat nerd footnote too. McGwire doesn’t hold the single season home run record. That record, along with the all-time career home runs record, belongs to Barry Bonds, who set the single season mark with 73 in 2001, on his way to a career total of 762. Bonds, too, was unquestionably a PED using cheater, who’s never admitted to it, even though everyone knows he did it.
So what? Bonds owns the records. He may never get into the Hall of Fame, but he owns the records, and walked away from baseball wealthy beyond most people’s wildest dreams. Just because the evidence is incontrovertible, doesn’t mean people don’t get away with things, at least in this mortal realm.
Here’s a few other things that everyone with more than two functional brain cells should be capable of figuring out, given the available evidence:
- Carol Baskin killed her husband, and walks around a free woman.
- Jeffrey Epstein didn’t kill himself.
- O.J. Simpson roams the golf courses looking for the “real killer” of Ron Goldman and Nicole Brown Simpson, when all he needs to do is look in a mirror.
- Democrats in multiple states committed voter fraud to ensure that China Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election.
What to do? Well, there’s not likely much that I can do myself. But at the very least, I can take Dick Young’s advice, and wear out the asterisk key on my keyboards over the next few years.