Amidst the forty-eight consecutive hours of coverage the MLB network devoted recently to the suspension of Manny Ramirez, Bob Costas was the only talking head to bring up the single point that I have always chosen to make about the effect of the steroid era on baseball. That point: In the same way there was a shift from the dead ball era prior to 1919 to the 40% increase in run scoring that followed thereafter, the introduction of steroids into baseball has effectively changed the game into something unrecognizable.
"Unless you believe, that by some cosmic coincidence, that more than half of the greatest power hitters that ever lived descended upon the game in a five or six year cluster," Costas said, "Something extremely fishy was going on there that was different from the changes in other eras."
But for every baseball purist who claims the change has been for the worse, there is some blowhard who claims that the long ball puts people in the seats and is in some way better for baseball. The best isolated experiment on this was in the years 1985-1987, when Major League Baseball is widely believed to have been "juicing" the baseball. The home run totals for those years spiked from 3,258 in 1984 to a peak of 4,458 in 1987 before dropping straight back down to 3,180 in 1988.
It's hard to take an ideological stand against the home run. It would be tough to make the claim that the home run has ruined baseball. But it has, in a way, ruined baseball. Baseball didn't die at the end of the dead-ball era. Nor did it die in 1987, nor upon integration from '47 to '59, all of which represent jumps in home run totals on the above graph. Baseball never 'died.' It did, however, lose a few limbs. Among them: the triple, the swinging bunt, the hit and run, the complete game (CG), not to mention what I believe to be the most exciting play in baseball, the stolen base.
Before baseball fell in love with the home run, few players went up to the plate looking to knock it out of the park. More recently, it has been the equivalent of the Bush Administration's approach to the Iraq war: strong man, big swing, tiny ball, trying to get this thing over and done with as quickly as possible.
The answer to baseball's love fest with the home run -- the antithesis of strategy and team-oriented play -- was elucidated in something ESPN's Jon Miller brought up during Sunday night's Red Sox - Rays game. While Carl Crawford went to the plate for the second time that night, Miller noted the fact that in 1999, as a senior in high school, Crawford was offered a full football scholarship to Nebraska to run the option as a quarterback (Eric Crouch filled this role instead and went on the win the Heisman in 2001) as well as a full basketball scholarship to UCLA to be their point guard. Instead, Crawford chose to climb the minor league grease pole with the fledgling Tampa Bay Devil Rays for four years. This year he is on pace to steal 105 bases. That would be the 15th best season of all time and the 5th best since 1891. How many home runs does Crawford have? One.
This is precisely what baseball needs: more Carl Crawfords. And by that I mean more athletes. More guys who are as good in the field as they are on the bases. More well rounded players and less 50 home run/150 strikeout dopers who hide out in left field.
The fans are not likely to buy this. Most have shown that they're not all that put off by players taking steroids. Attendance has been up, even since the widespread use of steroids has been made known. But once the foundations of baseball are resurrected, and we can enjoy all of the things the home run has taken from us--baserunning, situational hitting, and the pitcher's duel--there will be a lot more "baseball" for us to enjoy.
