Adding an asterisk could change the game forever, By: David Whitley
April 9, 2006, The Orlando Sentinel
ORLANDO, Fla. - To (ASTERISK) or not to (ASTERISK), that is the question.
With all due apologies to William Shakespeare, that is baseball's big question this season. The game is mired in a Shakespearean tragedy worthy of the record books.
Or maybe it isn't.
The player who would be the game's biggest hero has turned into a super villain. Now Barry Bonds is seven home runs away from breaking Babe Ruth's iconic mark of 714.
What could have been a national celebration has turned into a raging debate. Should Bonds' records count, or should baseball break out the most dreaded punctuation mark in its arsenal?
The asterisk.
"Players who break the law and cheat should be severely punished," Sen. Jim Bunning roared in a congressional hearing. "Their records and stats from when they use steroids should be wiped out."
Bunning is not just another pontificating politician. He's a Hall of Fame pitcher who speaks for a lot of people.
A USA Today/CNN/Gallup poll showed 52 percent of baseball fans believe Bonds' records should be taken away if he's found guilty of taking steroids. One of baseball's corporate sponsors isn't waiting on those findings.
According to Bloomberg News, Bank of America Corp. will not participate in any celebration for Bonds. It doesn't want to be associated with controversy.
The asterisk debate isn't so easy to walk away from. Putting a footnote next to records has been a contentious issue since Roger Maris broke Ruth's single-season record 45 years ago. A lot of fans don't like it, regardless of whose name is involved.
"It's patently absurd," Rod Nelson said. "You just can't go there."
He is the research services director for the Society for American Baseball Research. The 7,000-member group is dedicated to preserving the integrity of baseball's records.
It will spend years researching boxscores from the 1920s to verify or debunk the most arcane statistics. The members like to argue about the smallest baseball minutiae, but all agreed at their last convention that Bonds and his ilk should not be asterisked.
The objection is mainly philosophical. Numbers have no moral value, Nelson said. They are data and should not be judged subjectively for worthiness.
That certainly flies against the howling winds of revisionism. Bunning and others not only want an asterisk. They want an "Rx" next to the names of players who took steroids or other illegal supplements.
Get it? Rx - prescription for what ails baseball?
It sounds good in a congressional hearing. But an Rx would raise issues that defy simple solutions. Does Major League Baseball single out only the lead player in this pharmaceutical drama?
Bonds may have ingested enough human growth hormone to turn a tree shrew into Sharon Stone. All he's admitted to, however, is accidental exposure to steroids from his trainer. Pending the findings of baseball's investigation, that may be all the semi-hard evidence Bud Selig has to go on.
What about those who've been caught or acknowledged taking steroids?
"Where do you draw the line?" Nelson said. "It's the whole can of worms and Pandora's box thing."
You could start with Mark McGwire. If Bonds' 73-homer season gets an asterisk, shouldn't Big Mac's 70 get cut down to size?
How does baseball determine which of Rafael Palmeiro's 569 home runs were legit, and how many were juiced? Do the Braves get stripped of two division titles because Gary Sheffield was roaming the outfield?
Jason Giambi admitted to taking steroids such as Clomid, a female fertility drug. He didn't give birth to any children, but Giambi did pop out a MVP award with Oakland.
Does baseball take away that, as well as the four consecutive MVPs Bonds won during the tail end of the Steroid Era?
Giambi hit two home runs off Pedro Martinez in Game 7 of the 2003 American League Championship Series. If not for that, Aaron Boone would not have had a chance to hit his walkoff homer.
The Red Sox may well have made the World Series. Could they have beaten the Florida Marlins and ended the Curse of the Bambino a year before they did?
Should baseball historians note that? If so, where does tracking the steroid ripples end? Talk about a can of pumped-up worms.
And we won't even get into Jose Canseco's 7,057 at-bats. Though the drugs might explain a lot of other things with him.
Then there is the confounding fact that Bonds and the bashers were not breaking any rules, since there were no rules to break.
Baseball didn't have a policy against steroids until 2002. Unprescribed steroids were illegal under federal law, but nobody has been charged or convicted with that crime.
What's a sport to do?
Unlike the Olympics or Little League and many other organizations, baseball rarely expunges or even puts punctuation marks next to records.
The most famous asterisk in history was the one Commissioner Ford Frick hung on Maris. The asterisk was only mythical.
In official Elias Sports Bureau print, Ruth's 60-homer season in 154 games appeared next to Maris' 61 in 162 games, with no asterisk involved. In 1991, Fay Vincent removed Ruth's name altogether.
Kenesaw Mountain Landis may have banned eight players for life, but there are no asterisks next to anything associated with the 1919 Black Sox. As far as the record books show, Cincinnati won that World Series fair and square.
And once baseball starts handing out asterisks for steroid cheats, does it expand to slicksters such as Gaylord Perry, who won 314 games with a combination of skill, guile and Vaseline?
Evolutionary change also invites an asterisk invasion. Should there be pre-integration and post-integration stats? To truly compare Ruth to Bonds, San Francisco would have to play all day games, travel by train and never face a Dominican shortstop.
None of which makes the Bunnings of the world want to put away their punctuation marks. And as Bonds closes in on Ruth, the cries to do something only will get louder.
Ban him? Ban his records? Asterisk them?
If Shakespeare were writing the script, Bonds probably would be poisoned in the end. Not even his scorned mistress has advocated that.
Whatever Selig does, it appears baseball's steroid headache only is going to get worse. And it will take far more than an Rx to make it go away.
