Free Triumph and Tragedy in Mudville by Stephen Jay Gould Page B

to Ponder: Why So Many Homers?” in the Wall Street Journal, October 10, 2001.
     
    As we cherish a happy note in the diapason of our emotional lives, we also wonder why this good news must dismember a comforting plateau of relative stability. Ruth’s 60 and Maris’s 61 set enduring standards, each lasting more than thirty years. We expected the same extended glory for McGwire’s 70, now fallen before we could even explore the appearance and meaning of this new Everest.
     

    San Francisco Giant Barry Bonds hugs his son Nikolai after hitting his 70th home run against the Houston Astros on October 4, 2001. The next day, against the Los Angeles Dodgers, Bonds would hit his 71st and 72nd home runs to break Mark McGwire’s three-year-old record. Credit: AP/Wide World Photos
     
    We may, I think, best grasp Bonds’s achievement by struggling to understand two numerical aspects of his remarkable deed—one conventional among sporting records, the other surprising. First, Bonds’s 73 dingers follow the usual pattern of incremental improvement, rather than shattering breakthrough. When Ruth hit 60 in 1927, he broke his own record of 59 from 1921. Maris’s 61 in 1961 also added a minimal increment. These heights, then, slide evenly down to Greenberg and Foxx at 58, Wilson at 56, Mantle at 54, etc. McGwire’s 70 seemed to fracture the scale, but the disturbing gap quickly filled, restoring a comforting incrementalism with McGwire at 70, Sosa at 66 in the same 1998 season, McGwire at 65 in 1999, Sosa with 64 this year, and Sosa again with 63 in 1999.
    But in a second and disconcerting feature, this Giant has broken all decorum by so accelerating the pace of fracture that we can hardly stabilize our admiration before transcendence forces a reorientation. Sure, “records are made to be broken,” as the cliché proclaims. But truly great records should endure for a little while, at least long enough to potentiate the stuff of legend across a single generation: “Son, I remember when…Oh yeah, Dad, you were there? Really, honest!”
    Our discombobulated lives need to sink some anchors in numerical stability. (I still have not recovered from the rise of a pound of hamburger at the supermarket to more than a buck.) Ripken waited a long time to break Gehrig’s feat of endurance. DiMaggio’s fifty-six-game hitting streak remains unchallenged (with a distant forty-four for second place), but may one day fall. Cy Young’s 511 career victories will never be exceeded unless surgeons invent an iron arm, or pitchers return to the old practice of working every fourth day and finishing what they start.
    This acceleration therefore raises a question that I, as a statistician of the game, generally regard as inappropriate. Broken records usually demand no special explanation, despite our inclination to view any increment as a uniquely heroic feat accomplished for a particular reason of valor. In this case, however, we do need to understand our current epidemic of homers, permitting three great players to exceed, and several others to challenge, all within the past four seasons, a plateau of 60 reached only twice before in 120 years of major league baseball. No random “blip” can encompass so much done so quickly by so many.
    I tend to dismiss the three most common conjectures, but wish to defend a fourth notion rarely aired in this growing debate. First, we cannot ascribe this outburst to the sociology of changing fan preferences for displays of raw power. The great sluggers of the past—from the versatile Ruths to the single-minded Kiners or Killebrews—played “long ball” just as assiduously, and the domination of hitting over pitching peaked during the 1920s and 1930s, not in modern baseball.
    Second, despite all conspiratorial suspicions and reasoned arguments, numerous tests of old vs. new balls find no “juicing up” of the projectile, either consciously ordered or accidentally achieved. Third, and finally, knee-jerk