Are Records Transitory?

Article by Rob Neyer, lifted from ESPN.com

"I don't want to be Babe Ruth. He was a great ballplayer. I'm not trying to replace him. The record is there and damn right I want to break it, but that isn't replacing Babe Ruth."-- Roger Maris, 1961

"I don't care how many home runs Aaron or anyone else hits. They cannot replace the Babe. Lindbergh was the first man to fly nonstop across the Atlantic. Nobody remembers who was the second or third. So it is with the Babe."-- Mrs. Babe Ruth, 1973

"Babe Ruth will always be No. 1. Before I broke his record, it was the greatest of all. Then I broke it, and suddenly the greatest record is Joe DiMaggio's hitting streak."-- Henry Aaron, 1973

With all due respect to Messrs. Maris and Aaron, Mrs. Ruth was right. As great as Maris and Aaron were, they simply couldn't impact the game as the Babe did.

Maris did hit more home runs in a single season than Ruth ever did, but any reasonable observer could have guessed that eventually somebody would break that record. After all, only three years after Ruth hit 60 homers (in 1927), Hack Wilson hit 56 home runs. Two years after Wilson hit 56, Jimmie Foxx hit 58. And six years after Foxx hit 58, Hank Greenberg hit 58, too. Really, it was inevitable (he wrote, with the benefit of hindsight): the right hitter in the right season in the right ballpark, with a dash of good luck ... Ruth's record would fall.

Aaron hit more home runs in a career than Ruth did, and soon Barry Bonds will have as well. But again, this was inevitable, wasn't it? Ted Williams might have broken Ruth's career record if not for his service during two wars, and Willie Mays might have caught Ruth if he hadn't spent nearly two full seasons in the U.S. Army. It wound up being Aaron, of course, but it could have been Williams or Mays or Frank Robinson or Mickey Mantle or Harmon Killebrew or somebody else. It is Aaron's record, but someday it will belong to somebody else. Barry Bonds, perhaps, or Alex Rodriguez, or Delmon Young, or somebody who's in high school right now. It's just a matter of time, and most of us will live long enough to see it happen.

Which is a long-winded way of saying that while records do tell us something about the players who set them, they are inherently transitory and thus deficient in true meaning. If you know what I mean.

Babe Ruth meant something. No, I won't argue that Ruth "saved" baseball in the wake of the Black Sox scandal. Baseball was (and is) plenty strong enough to survive just about any scandal, with or without Babe Ruth (or Cal Ripken or McGwire/Sosa). I will argue that he bent the game to his amazing strength and will.

In 1919, his last season with the Red Sox, Ruth hit 29 home runs. Not so impressive? Ruth's teammates totaled four home runs. In 1920, Ruth's first season with the Yankees, he shattered his own record by hitting 54 home runs. No other American League team hit more than 50 (and two National League teams didn't manage even 20 homers).

It's often said that Ruth essentially taught, by example, the rest of baseball what could be done. There's undoubtedly some truth to that. But as late as 1927, when Ruth established his legacy by hitting 60 home runs, he outhomered every other American League club.

Numbers-wise, Barry Bonds has been just as devastating as Ruth. In Bonds' four best seasons, he proved he could hit more home runs than Ruth, could draw more walks than Ruth and could even bat .370 like Ruth. What Bonds did not do was change the way the game was played. Yes, he'll forever be the poster child -- or perhaps the wanted poster -- when people talk about illicit performance-enhancing drugs. And there's little doubt that some players have followed Bonds' example (and will continue).
But Bonds didn't create the drug culture; he's simply the ultimate product, a stunning combination of opportunity, ability and hard work. Or, to borrow from a long-ago (and now forgotten) best-selling novel, Bonds is little more than "the logical development of the American tendency to 'get there' no matter how ... an exaggerated molecule."

Barry Bonds has spent the last eight seasons bouncing around in a desperate race to break the records set by those who came before him. Babe Ruth didn't care who came before him, and the only records he cared about breaking were those he already owned. He also owned the game for the better part of an era, and that's just not something that Barry Bonds -- or, it should be said, any other player today -- can do.