Major League Baseball

Making sense of Alex Rodriguez's records

Published Jun. 9, 2015 2:07 p.m. ET

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By Marty Gitlin

The first milestone to fall was the 660 home runs slugged by Giants legend Willie Mays. Alex Rodriguez surpassed it on May 6 to become the fourth-leading home run hitter in baseball history.

The next icon to have his mark passed was Lou Gehrig. Rodriguez overtook the Iron Horse in career runs batted in three weeks later and has moved into fourth place overall.

Imagine that. The “Say Hey Kid” and the “luckiest man on the face of the earth” overtaken by a self-absorbed, lying cheater. And in the city of New York, no less, where both Mays and Gehrig cleanly honed their craft.

Rodriguez has already set his sights on the alleged career home run mark set by Barry Bonds of 762. In the immortal words of The Church Lady on “Saturday Night Live,” isn’t that special?

One need not be old school to not only root against Rodriguez in these pursuits — just as they did against Bonds in his quest to bypass Aaron on the all-time home run list — but to also believe that such marks should not be recognized by Major League Baseball.

The use of performance enhancing drugs to accomplish the lofty numbers recorded by Bonds and Rodriguez should not be dismissed. The mind-boggling effect steroids had on baseball as it rebounded from the work stoppage of 1994 and early 1995 were evident in the statistics. Forty-three 50-home run seasons have been achieved in baseball history. Eighteen of them were recorded between 1995 and 2002. The top six were accomplished by Bonds, Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa from 1998–2001. All have either admitted to taking steroids or have overwhelming evidence against them.

Some have criticized those who dictate who is inducted into the Hall of Fame for overwhelmingly voting against Bonds, McGwire, Sosa, Rafael Palmeiro, and others who starred in the steroid era and put up numbers that would typically land them in the hallowed halls on the first ballot. Don’t count this writer among them. In fact, baseball fans with whom I have associated over the years have generally agreed that none of them belong in the Hall of Fame.

Please don’t mark me down as a crotchety old man railing about the sanctity of the game and the more modern generations of players. I don’t feel anyone who has cheated to the extent of a Bonds or Sosa has earned the right to have their records recognized by the sport or a place in the Hall.

Among them, in fact, is one of my favorite pitchers when I was a teenager — Gaylord Perry. The colorful right-hander was suspected of throwing the spitball when he pitched for the Giants, then my Indians from 1972–75, before moving on. I was filled with both excitement and resentment when opposing managers would send umpires out to the mound to attempt (always in vain) to uncover evidence of the lubricant Perry just had to be using to make his pitches drop.

I loved Perry because he was winning the Cy Young Award for my team. But as a journalist and a simply older and wiser man who has grown more objective and critical, I now feel Perry has no place in the Hall of Fame. He has admitted to cheating. He did not toss the spitter on rare occasions; he threw it all the time. Such Hall of Famers as Yankees right-hander Whitey Ford cut baseballs on the mound or had their catchers do the same on belt buckles to make them, as the expression went, fall off the table. Perhaps Ford too does not deserve his place in the Hall.

Where does it all end? Unfortunately, there can be no just solution. It is too late to research all the potential cheaters in baseball history and justify the removal of some from the Hall of Fame while dispatching their records to the dustbin of history, then in turn deem other suspects clean. Far too much time has passed for that to happen.

But it’s not too late to take a stand now. It’s not too late for Major League Baseball to declare that the records supposedly being established by Alex Rodriguez are forever tainted by steroids, just as the voters deciding on who is inducted into the Hall of Fame have taken a stand against the Bondses, Sosas, and McGwires of the world.

It’s all hope against hope, of course. The baseball establishment, which turned a blind eye on to the steroid era when it was at its height because fans were streaming into ballparks to watch their unusually muscle-bound and barrel-chested heroes, will never wipe out those records.

Too bad. It makes many baseball fans sick to their stomachs to know that the true heroes of the game, such as Aaron, Mays, Ruth, and Gehrig, are losing their records to the more modern-day athletes who didn’t respect the game enough to play it cleanly.

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