Milestones Around One's Neck
Yesterday there were only three major league games, and in one of them we had the possibility of two milestone home runs being hit -- Cincinnati at Philly. Junior Griffey Jr. was sitting on 499 career dingers, and Jim Thome was sitting on 399.
Thome hit number 400 in the first at-bat of the game (an at-bat I'm actively considering for an at-bat of the year nominee; yes yes I'm working on LeCroy vs. Wagner). Junior sat the game out, allegedly for a day of rest, but the rumour was he wanted to hit the milestone at home (and to spare his family the off-day trip to Philly for a make-up game.)
These milestones don't mean what they once did, in the sense that with 37 members (and counting) of the 400-homer club, and 19 (and counting) in the 500 club, getting to what used to be specific magic numbers seems a little less special. In my market, the ESPN game was Prior vs. Clemens, not the miletstone-laden game, which to me seems like a much better decision about which game to broadcast.
I have a mild objection to Griffey sitting this one out. He's hot, and his team lost the game despite several situations where a left-handed power hitter would've been called for with men on base. The Reds have another off-day scheduled for later this week. Did the Reds pooch this game because they wanted to script a milestone? To goose attendance in the next home series? If so, this is a threat to the integrity of the game: the Reds might not have been doing all they could to win a game. That's cheating the fans.
Fred McGriff isn't shy about saying he wants to get to 500 home runs, and when asked directly about it, he more or less said it was because he thought 500 homers would guarantee his entrance into the Hall of Fame. That may be so: but once upon a time 400 homers was guaranteed entrance into the Hall of Fame, and a Darrell Evans (414) and Dave Kingman (442) later, that milestone was re-evaluated. While I strongly suspect McGriff's career value is greater than, say, Orlando Cepeda (379), I'm sure he wasn't as good a player as Jim Rice (382), who has no chance of getting into the Hall at this point. In fact, speaking of players finishing out their nine DHing for Tampa Bay, I'd say Jose Canseco (462) was a more dominant and more valuable player than McGriff - remember when 40/40 was considered something really amazing?
The quasi-mathematical problem with milestones, of course, is that either the bar has to be continuously raised (HR, for example), or they become unpassable (300 wins?) as the ggame evolves. This makes a particular milestone inherently instable.
We love our milestones, of course, because they're fun. They provide false benchmarks at arbitrary round numbers that allow us to play the apples-and-oranges debate of today's players vs. the all-time greats without having to get out the slide rule. Players get sucked into thinking they're actually meaningful.
If, god forbid (I have him on my rotisserie team), Junior, say, has an epiphany and decides to quit baseball tomorrow to work building houses for Habitat for Humanity, he'd still be a Hall of Fame player based on what he already has done. Sticking around for a milestone 500th doesn't make McGriff any more (or less) a HoFer than, say, if Harold Baines had stuck around for his 3000th hit. Except that, of course, the milestones are used for the second-tier players to argue they should be in or out. Rice suffers from having fallen off .300, and from having failed to play a couple of years below his maximum capabilities just to pass 400. I still find it hard to put Jim Thome in Jim Rice's class, as good a player as Thome is.
The milestone is an ugly impediment to enjoying baseball, and a lousy way to judge players. It's the kind of thing that gives statistics a bad name. But I don't see the obsession of players and fans alike with them abating anytime soon.
On a related note, it's really time to change the rather arbitrary rule concerning player statistics in games that end in a rain-out prior to the game becoming official. Had yesterday's game been rained out -- there were three long rain delays -- Jim Thome might've had to hit career homer No. 400 twice. That's kind of deflating. Starters who pitch well but are rained out after 4 innings lose an entire start, but it's never in their statistical record. These games are real games, even if they end in a no-decision: let's count the statistics. The statistics for tie games, which are rare enough, count as long as the game has gone 5 IP. And often rainouts are not made up, which seems a bit unfair to players' statistical records in another way.
A game's a game, if we're going to obsessively count statistics, let's count every game that's been played.
posted by The Crank 11:45 AM
