Reggie Jackson's fuzzy math

By Jeff Kallman Sports Central Columnist

Reggie Jackson, under customary circumstances, rarely fails to provoke serious thought or delight. His heart has never been in the wrong place when it comes to the state of the game. But his latest commentary regarding That Issue and Those Numbers is as offline as were those pitches he swung on and missed when he wasn't connecting for some impeccable homeruns.

Says Jackson: "Somebody definitely is guilty of taking steroids, but if we (baseball veterans and/or Hall of Famers) speak the truth and show our concern, it's like, 'Oh, they're just whining.'"

On this point, Mr. October has a point. Why on earth should baseball veterans and/or Hall of Famers not wish to speak on the state of the game? And why on earth should they be dismissed as mere whiners for doing so, the Hall of Famers in particular?

As Jackson himself observed subsequently, you have, among others to call upon, Bob Gibson, Sandy Koufax, and Johnny Bench. Why not solicit their thinking, indeed, and on matters other than the Pete Rose business?

Says Jackson: "Come on, now. You can't be breaking records hitting 200 homeruns in three or four seasons. The greatest hitters in the history of the game didn't do that."

Want to tell that to Babe Ruth? He hit 207 homeruns in one four-year time frame, from 1926 through 1929. The second of those seasons, of course, was the one in which he sent 60 over the fence. (He broke his own single-season record doing so, by the way.) That is a mere eight homeruns' difference to the 2000-2003 timeframe in the second season of which Barry Bonds whacked his infamous 73.

If Bonds is Jackson's apparent target, perhaps Jackson would care to note someone else breaking records hitting 200 homeruns in three or four seasons. From 1997 through 2000, in the second season of which he broke Roger Maris's record with 70, Mark McGwire hit 225 homeruns.

And there is at least one man who hit 200 or more homeruns in two four-season timeframes without breaking the single-season homerun record -- or even leading his league. In the same four seasons over which McGwire hit those 225, Sammy Sosa hit 215 out. Now: in the four-season timeframe that includes all three of his 60+ homerun seasons, Sosa hit 243 out.

Says Jackson: "Henry Aaron never hit 50 in a season, so you're going to tell me that you're a greater hitter than Henry Aaron? Bonds hit 73 [in 2001], and he would have hit 100 if they would have pitched to him. I mean, come on, now. There is no way you can outperform Aaron and Ruth and Mays at that level."

That, Mr. October, is what you think. Who says never hitting 50 homeruns in a season means you cannot have been a better hitter than Henry Aaron? (On the unlikely assumption that Henry Aaron himself happens upon these words, please understand that I am not here to debunk Henry Aaron.)

With apologies to Jim McCarty (the Yardbirds' drummer who created the line originally about guitarist Jeff Beck), it has often been said that Ted Williams was the greatest hitter who ever lived, and many are still inclined to agree with him. Want to know how many 50-homer seasons Teddy Ballgame had? Zero. Stan Musial, anyone? He may be the Hall of Fame's most underrated member. Musial is considered Ted Williams's closest batting comp for players at age 39.

Seek and ye shall not find even one 50-homerun season on The Man's resume. There are those who think he has a case as maybe the greatest all-around hitter who ever lived, or at least one of the top-10.

Say, hey, what about Willie Mays himself? He had two 50-homerun seasons. They were separated by nine full seasons in which his 162-game average homerun output was about 37. Mays has a better career on-base percentage and slugging percentage than Henry Aaron, but Aaron lifetime produced five more runs per 162 games, average, than Mays.

Some might consider that run productivity differential evidence for the case that Willie Mays wasn't quite as good a hitter as Henry Aaron with a pair of 50-homer seasons.

Says Jackson: "There is a reason why the greatest players of all-time have 500. Then there is that group that is above 550. There is a reason for that. Guys played 19, 20, 25 years. They had 9,000 to 10,000 at-bats, and it was the same for everybody. Now, all of a sudden, you're hitting 50 when you're 40."

Barry Bonds was 36 when he sent 73 into the seats or the cove in 2001. That was two years older than was Mark McGwire when he sent his 70 over the fence in 1998.

What is Jackson trying to say, then? That Roger Maris might be the only legitimate single-season homerun record hitter? Maris was only 26 when he defied the world and passed the Babe; Mickey Mantle, who joined Maris in the chase until a hip infection shelved him down the stretch, was an old man of 29.

(Considering the sub-crowds among us who incline from their own, ahem, 'roid rage, to use differentials between big homerun seasons as "proof" that someone is "juiced," one is surprised only that Jackson hadn't noticed a difference of 22 homeruns between Maris's 1960 and 1961, or the difference of 28 between 1961 and 1962, when Maris reverted back to a mere 33, and pondered whether there was not something somewhat screwy going on. Oops! That's Jeff Kent's department.)

In Maris's day, the columnist Dick Young suggested The Asterisk to Ford Frick, the better to keep Ruth's record "safe" from "illegitimate" conquerors, one of the most disgraceful examples on record of those trying arbitrarily to isolate specific achievements. (There was never an actual an asterisk -- you can look it up -- but there was too long a separate-record listing for Maris and Ruth, until Fay Vincent ended the nonsense in 1991.)

Are we really prepared to let the 'roid rage turn back toward drawing arbitrary criteria for breaking baseball records, again?

Those who admired Young (there were many) would say he acted from the best of intentions; those who deplored Young (there were many) would say nothing mattered except his own ability to transform bias into canon.

Whatever it truly was, Young's suggestion subverted the integrity of the game to at least that extent to which the steroid scandal, short of the smoking gun (or the incontrovertible proof that steroids do enhance the acts that compose the play of baseball), is deemed to subvert it. Reggie Jackson, of all men, should know better than to let himself be caught committing comparable witlessness.

Article courtesy of Sports Central.