Heard someone say the other day that Alex Rodriguez is the greatest ballplayer of his generation. My initial reaction? How would we know?
True greatness has become an oxymoron in the steroids era. For baseball fans, that’s the greatest tragedy in all this.
We know too much, which, strange as it seems, has led us to know too little. Unlike previous generations of fans, we have no way of defining greatness anymore. We haven’t just lost faith. We’ve lost our barometer.
Back in the day, we knew Aaron and Mays and Koufax were great, so much so that I don’t have to use their first names. And, for one season, Joe Charboneau and Mark Fidrych were pretty darn good. But things are different in the steroids era.
This cuts to the core of why we’re fans in the first place. We don’t shell out six bucks a beer to watch utility infielders and middle relievers muddle in mediocrity. We do it for a rare glimpse at the great ones. But we can’t look at a player anymore and know we’re watching something special. We can hope, but we don’t know.
There are too many accusations, too much innuendo, too many reasons to believe it’s beyond our worst initial fears. If all players, even the innocent ones, will perform under the same cloud of suspicion, it’s impossible to truly appreciate the ones who stand out.
That’s what steroids have wrought in baseball. Reality left town when Barry Bonds jumped from a career high of 49 home runs to 73, passing the 50s and 60s without a speed bump. Now there’s no way of knowing what we’re really watching, no way of determining if a player’s skills are God-given or if they were FedEx’d to him by one of Victor Conte’s mad scientists.
Sure, Rodriguez’s numbers look great. But knowing what we now know, they’ve lost their relevance. Bonds? Please. By the end, he had all the attraction of an ambulance scene along a highway, a sight to be cringed at more than appreciated.
For all the mistakes the players association has made, Don Fehr and his merry band of spin doctors are right about one thing. The players are the game. Maybe that’s why the game, for all its simple splendor, is hard to love anymore.
