Maris Still at Top of My Book

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From the Daily News:

Maris Still at Top of My Book

ISLAMORADA, Fla. - We keep saying that baseball needs to send a message about steroids. You know how it can send a message? Convene an emergency session of the Veterans Committee and put Roger Maris into the Hall of Fame this week. Make this the message: The last magic number in baseball is still 61, and it still belongs to him.

Once, the magic number in baseball, the most glamorous in all of sports, was 60. It wasn't four minutes for the mile or 1,000 yards rushing in football. Or 2,000 yards when 1,000 became obsolete. It wasn't even the 100 points in a game that Wilt Chamberlain scored one night in Hershey, Pa., against the Knicks. It was 60, because that is how many home runs Babe Ruth hit in a season once, and for more than three decades in baseball, it looked as if nobody would ever hit more.

Then it became 61, because of Maris. He hit 61 in 1961, and passed Ruth and now he was the all-time single-season home run king in baseball, even though a dim-bulb baseball commissioner named Ford Frick tried to put an asterisk next to that number, as though Ruth were still the king.

You know what? There should be an asterisk next to it now, now and for all times, but not for the reasons that Frick intended, back when he wanted to draw some tortured distinction between what Ruth did in a 154-game schedule and what Maris did over 162. There should be an asterisk next to Maris' 61 for as long as there is baseball, like some kind of spotlight, because we know that the number was true and real.

No drugs.

And no lies.

You want to put a different kind of asterisk next to McGwire's name now? Go right ahead, I won't stop you. For the longest time, over all this time in baseball when we have finally begun to question the home-run numbers we have seen from McGwire and Sammy Sosa - "I know nothing" - and Barry Bonds, there has been the debate about whether there should be some kind of asterisk in the record books because of steroids, because of the black cloud of suspicion over these guys. And I kept thinking there was no point. Until I watched that shameful performance from McGwire on Thursday in front of Congress, when he did not even have the courage to take the Fifth Amendment. So he took it without really taking it.

McGwire wanted to say that baseball had a drug problem, but not him. The first step in any 12-step program is admitting you have a problem. Not in McGwire's world. He wanted to admit BASEBALL has a problem, but not him. He wanted to cry instead of telling the truth.

Even Tony La Russa doesn't defend McGwire anymore. Nobody else does after Thursday. His performance was a lie, and if you want to believe those 70 home runs were at least partly a lie, go right ahead.

But then, we have become a country of artful liars. Or at least creative truth-tellers. McGwire just joined the crowd the other day. A few years ago, when people wanted to ask the current President about his hell-raising younger days, he said he didn't want to look back, he wanted to look towards the future. We were supposed to cheer him. Maybe McGwire thought he could get away with the same thing on Thursday. He wanted all the benefits of the Fifth Amendment without actually saying the words. Gangsters were tougher than this in front of Sen. Kefauver in the '50s.

Now Mark McGwire will be judged as harshly by history as Bonds will, and maybe more harshly, because of what we saw and heard from him on Thursday. We have gone over this before: Bonds doesn't care what we think. He would never allow himself to beg for approval the way McGwire did. He is more arrogant than that in his denials.

McGwire is no better.

I don't believe either one of them. We keep hearing that this is baseball's problem. We heard it from Congress all day and all night. Baseball better clean up its own house, or not. But McGwire was dirty. We know Bonds was, too, according to his grand jury testimony, even if he says he didn't know what he was doing. And don't tell me what they were doing wasn't against baseball law because there was no drug policy.

If you don't think these guys knew what they were doing was wrong, then you are as much a fool as McGwire was Thursday, thinking we would buy an act like this.

Maybe it would have been different if Junior Griffey had stayed healthy. Once, we believed he would be the one to break all the home run records, when 61 was still the magic number, before that became 70 for McGwire. And then 73 for Bonds.

Perfect. A crooked number for a crooked stat.

You want to send a message? Say new information has come to light. Then send Roger Maris to Cooperstown. Even the cheats will understand a message like that.

* * *

Isn't it funny how a chatty guy like Sammy Sosa suddenly needed an interpreter when he went before Congress?

You want to know the truth of the current steroid situation in baseball, right up to the minute?

Donald Fehr and Gene Orza of the Players Association still don't think steroids and performance-enhancing drugs are that big a problem.

True.

Whatever they say in public.

Well, Orza doesn't get to say much in public anymore.

He seems to have been under house arrest for a while, right?

How come Bud Selig was supposed to sound all these alarms about steroids as early as 1998 and the media wasn't supposed to do the exact same thing?

We always get to second-guess everybody.

We hardly ever second-guess ourselves, especially not on the big stuff.

Jim Bunning made you sort of want to re-think athletes going into politics, didn't he?

Has there ever been a Knicks season, and I do mean ever, when there have been as many losses like the one Dwyane Wade tattooed on their foreheads the other night?

There are a lot of instant experts on baseball's drug policy who have never had a single conversation with anybody involved with negotiating it, or writing it.

Which is kind of neat.

Our politicians are pulling the same kind of fast one with Caring Bruce Ratner's arena in Brooklyn that Bloomberg and Doctoroff are pulling on the West Side.

Starting with the laws about eminent domain.

Incidentally, now the mayor gets help on his stadium from the National Football League, which is sort of like bringing in the mob.

And New Yorkers who will never get near a ticket to the 2010 Super Bowl are supposed to be dancing in the streets - West Side streets - because the league will award that Super Bowl to us if Bloomberg gets his stadium.

Tony Soprano would be proud.

Herb Williams is still worth rooting for, whether the Knicks make the playoffs or not.

Since this feud between Charles Dolan and his son, Son of Cablevision Dolan, has become almost Shakespearean, you have to believe there is at least a chance that the kid will end up losing the Garden.

And its sports teams.

This may sound like an overstatement, but it would only be cause for a city-wide holiday.

Because the longer this family owns the Garden, what is supposed to be a central plaza of our city will continue to shrink in glamour, in importance, in prestige.

Bob Schieffer can do the CBS Evening News for as long as he wants to.

Even if I am a Brian Williams guy.

Somebody should probably point out to Rep. Jose Serrano that if he doesn't have McGwire's Olympic card, he really doesn't have a rookie card worth having.

And while we're on the subject, did Henry Waxman get to be a big shot on the House Committee on Government Reform because all the good Congressmen were taken?

I was waiting for somebody to ask Sammy ("I Know Nothing") Sosa if he was aware he'd been traded to the Orioles.

Curt Schilling?

He seemed to agree and disagree with everything and everybody the other day, didn't he?

How many more autographs does Jason Giambi have to sign before he gets his merit badge?

Rafael Palmeiro saying he didn't use steroids and pointing his finger while he did reminded me of Clinton saying he didn't have sex with that woman.

You know, Ms. Lewinsky.

Palmeiro looked pretty relieved to me that he didn't have to answer questions in front of Congress about that feel-good drug he endorses.

[Pedantic]

Maris' 61 was nice and all, but he's no HOFer. He only hit thirty homers and 100 RBI three times, and his career OPS+ doesn't even come close to touching the top 100. Darryl Strawberry will get in before Maris.

I don't like steroids any more than the next guy, but cheating has always been prevalent throughout baseball. Are we going to put asterisks besides the statistics of the Hall of Fame pitchers who are known to have doctored balls? "Asterisks", if you will, are better left to the legions of "unofficial" baseball historians. Leave the official books alone or risk opening up a gigantic can of worms. My two cents.