(no subject)

Congratulations to Ken Griffey Junior for finally hitting his 600th major league home run. He becomes the sixth player to reach that mark officially; of those, it's all but stated in the record book that two (Barry Bonds and Sammy Sosa) cheated by using performance enhancing substances. The others are Babe Ruth, Willie Mays, and Henry Aaron, about whom there's general agreement that they played clean, in that sense. Griffey is also generally believed not to have used PEDs. For the rest of this discussion, we're focusing on honest achievements.

What makes Griffey's achievement remarkable is how much time he missed in what ought to have been the prime of his career. A normal year consists of 140-150 games, and 550 at bats, on average (allowing for days off). Griffey missed substantial portions of seven seasons:

1994: 111 G, 433 AB, 40 HR
1995: 72 G, 260 AB, 17 HR
2001: 111 G, 364 AB, 20 HR
2002: 70 G, 197 AB, 8 HR
2003: 53 G, 166 AB, 13 HR
2004: 83 G, 300 AB, 20 HR
2006: 109 G, 428 AB, 27 HR

Conservatively projecting those numbers (i.e., projecting to 550 AB and multiplying the differential in HR by 0.85 to allow for some cold spells), Griffey could EASILY have an additional 92 HR (109, unadjusted) and would be threatening Henry Aaron's all-time home run total (or, at least, taking solid aim at it, probably in 2009).

Certainly, injuries are part of the game, and might-have-beens are cheap and abundant. Still, the portion of Griffey's prime years lost to injuries was disproportionate to most athletes, and given the caliber of his performance and his achievements despite the injuries, it's fair to say that he's one of the all-time greats of the game.

Watch him while you can. It's rare that greatness is so easily recognized while it's happening.

(no subject)

Following up my previous discussion about home runs, I should note that while I am convinced that Barry Bonds cheated, and that his record is somewhere between questionable and horribly inflated, I do think that he was a terrific player before he decided, for whatever reason, that he needed the boost he got from The Cream and The Clear. It's possible, perhaps even likely, that he would have hit 600 HR legitimately, and assuming he did, he'd have surpassed Willie Mays' total. (Mays is Bonds' godfather, and they were always close. Reports had it from early on that Bonds had Mays in his sights from Day One.) It's by no means clear that he'd have been able to surpass Henry Aaron, as he did last year, nor hit over seventy home runs in one season.

I don't know that I'd advocate withdrawing official recognition of his record if clear evidence of Bonds using PEDs during his season-record year, or over a stretch of years, is unearthed. But I would certainly recommend, in that case, barring him from the Hall of Fame. Shoeless Joe Jackson was barred for cheating; so, too, should be anyone clearly and fairly shown to have used performance enhancers, even if they were technically not illegal at the time.

Boy, that seems to cut down the list of eligibles pretty thoroughly. McGuire, Sosa, Clemens atop the list, and it goes from there...