Flies, Pop Flies and Statistics

That header makes no sense, but go with it.

I was chatting with my dad the other day about sports. He is relatively progressive in his thinking, given his generation, but every once in a while has his "wins are a good way to judge a pitcher's performance" moments. So we were talking about...probably the Bonds trial I guess, and this lead to a larger commentary on sports, specifically why no on cares about steroids in football but are on suicide alert when it comes to baseball.

His conclusion, and many others of course, was this: No one cares about statistics in football. No one knows who the all time receptions, TD's or sacks leaders is/are/were. Everyone, however, knew who the home run king was and what the number was.

(Assuming, for the sake of argument, that no one knows or cares about football stats) This presumption made me think: I had no idea who the home run king was. Like, none. I probably knew Hank Aaron's name, but that's about it. I remember when this all cropped up with the steroids and Bonds and everything else I had a huge "Huh!" moment when I first learned who it was. Even now, honestly, I couldn't tell you what the number is without looking it up.

Looking back, it's not really crazy for me to not have known, I guess. I grew up watching baseball in the eighties. My first memories of baseball involve Don Mattingly and the Yankees seemingly always playing the Kansas City Royals around my birthday. There was really no reason for Phil Rizzuto or Bobby Mercer to mention Hank Aaron or how many homeruns he hit and I wasn't going to the library and reading about baseball. I was too busy playing it poorly.

So, I think the "everyone knew it" reason is kind of bullshit. I think, shockingly, that Baseball is, as always, a victim of its own Ken Burns cottage industry, cultivated over the decades. People know who hold records because they are singular. There is, usually, only one person with the most home runs, touchdowns, goals etc. It's easy to know and remember. Maybe we know these numbers in a vacuum, but often, people put them in a context for us. Baseball, unlike any other sport has been mythologized and tortured into an allegory for America by the people who have covered it. The home run, the people who hit home runs, and the number of home runs hit are the Titans of the myths.

Once Barry Bonds, Sosa, McGuire, et al., pulled the curtain aside and revealed baseball's dark shriveled secret, those same myth makers freaked the fuck out. "Sullied the game!" "These stats meant something once!"

What is left unsaid is that it meant something once because "we gave it meaning. We constructed this Matrix for the sake of good copy and now you are trying to tear it apart."


So, three people who read this, feel free to call me an uneducated fan for not knowing Hank Aaron hit the most home runs in baseball before Barry Bonds. But who cares, wasn't he just a compiler anyway?