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  Follow us as each week as our best writers from around the Bloguin Network take aim at each other and square off on anything and everything baseball from "who was better, Mays or Mantle" to "Should MLB have a salary cap?"
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Today's Debaters are:
Rex Jaybels, i94sports.com
Aarron Torres, Aaron Torres Sports
Today's Topic is:
Should MLB records eclipsed during the steroid era have asterisks?
MLB records eclipsed during the steroid era SHOULD have asterisks
By Aarron Torres, Aaron Torres Sports - Aaron Torres is a writer whose work has been featured on Sports Illustrated and syndicated by outlets such as USA Today and AOL.com. To read all of his work, please visit him at www.aarontorres-sports.com, and to see his thoughts on all things sports, follow him on Twitter @Aaron_Torres
For the sanctity of the game
So I already know what you're thinking...
Records eclipsed during the steroids era should have asterisks next to them? Really?
Here we go again with another old grumpy guy longing for the "old days." I bet he wishes everybody still wore cotton uniforms, there were no night games, and players still had nicknames like "Dizzy," "Red," and "Slappy." I bet he even hates puppies and babies too.
Well I promise you, I'm not that guy. I love puppies and children, and old people too. Not to mention red meat, apple pie, clogged arteries and beautiful women. I definitely love beautiful women.
I also love the Wild Card, interleague play and even Bud Selig's bad hairpiece. I really do. I'm a baseball realist, not a purist. I promise.
But when it comes to baseball's steroid era, I've got to draw the line in the sand. If only to protect Red and Slappy.
Because here's the thing: The reason we love baseball more than any other sport is because of the records, because we can compare eras and players and teams like we can't in another sport. It's what makes baseball great. It's what makes it our pastime.
Seriously, think about it. In basketball there's just no feasible way to compare eras. There isn't. Wilt Chamberlain once averaged 50 points a game for an entire season, Bill Russell once ripped down 36 rebounds in one quarter. Will either of those things ever happen again? Of course not.
Developments in strength, diet, health awareness and a million other things, mean that overall, the league is way more balanced than it was 50 years ago, or even 30. Russell and Chamberlain were basically the only seven footers in the entire league in the 1960's, now every team has three or four. Would Wilt average 50 in a season now? Shaq never even averaged 30.
It's the same with football. I mean, it was a nice sport in the 1960's and 70's, it was. But compared to now? It's like comparing Sarah Plain and Tall to Sarah Palin. Why even bother?
In 2010, the NFL is a league full of 6'3 receivers running 4.3 40's, and 6'8 330 offensive linemen moving like guys half their size. Put Bryant McKinnie on the field in Super Bowl V and it'd be like a scene in a bad sports movie, McKinnie driving the guy across from him into the ground, leaving an imprint in the grass, and his opponent seeing stars. Quite frankly, I'm pretty sure McKinnie could actually eat an offensive lineman from the ‘60's for dinner if he chose. Just as long as you gave him some barbeque sauce.
But baseball is different. It's the only sport where "bigger, faster, stronger," isn't only non-applicable, but in many regards a scientific impossibility.
Last year, Sports Illustrated did a piece on Cy Award winning pitcher Tim Lincecum that explained this phenomenon. The premise of the article was pretty simple, basically that Lincecum uses a pitching motion that literally makes him a throw a ball as fast as any human possibly can, given his size. There has never been, and will never be, someone (given Lincecum's physical attributes) that will be able to throw a baseball harder than he can right now.
That's why, in the 1940's and 1950's, you had pitchers topping out at 101 or 102 mph, and here and now, 60 years later, you have pitchers...topping out at 101 or 102 mph. Unlike basketball and football, where the advancements of evolution have changed the sport, in baseball, you won't flip on a game in 2025 and see someone hitting 140 on the radar gun. Our bodies won't allow it.
I'd have to assume it's the same with hitting. A guy can only generate so much bat speed, and hit a 100 mph fastball so perfectly with a wood bat, sending it so far over a wall. Again, I just can't imagine that in 2025, we'll see Ken Griffey III hitting 800 foot home runs. It's scientifically impossible.
Unlike golf and tennis, technological advancement in the equipment used hasn't altered the game much, if at all. Does Louisville Slugger make bats that much differently than they did 50 years ago? I'm no wood bat expert, but my logical, educated guess would be no.
Which is why baseball has been able to withstand the test of time. It's really not all that different than what our grandfather's watched 40, 50 and 60 years ago.
It's a game where strength and conditioning are certainly key, but keeping peak mental acuteness is more important. My point being, that if you took Willie Mays out of his prime and put him in centerfield at AT&T Park today, he'd still be an All-Star this summer. Take Bob Gibson out of the 1960's and he'd still win you quite a few games next season. Same with Lou Gehrig, Jackie Robinson and Bob Feller. Hell, give Mickey Mantle the same amount of whiskey he was drinking in 1953, and he'd still be your best player in 2010. Except now he'd probably be dating a Kardashian sister, with TMZ's cameras following him everywhere.
But it's because of this, because of what I said above, that records still matter. And it's important we cherish them.
Look, the simple truth is that players today have an almost endless amount of advantages over the people who played before them. In no particular order, they've got:
Improved strength and conditioning; personal trainers; personal chefs and dieticians; advanced medicine; advanced understanding of overall personal health; chartered airplanes and travel accommodations; more night games; five man pitching rotations; smaller ballparks; expansion era talent dilution; and I'm sure there's 50 other things I'm missing.
But here's the thing though, I'm ok with all that. Its simple evolution. And it's why players can tear an ACL today and be ready for spring training in six months, while it meant the end of a career 40 years ago. It's also to a larger degree, why we as people aren't walking around with our knuckles dragging on the ground. You can't stop evolution. Which is fine, I like walking upright and using my opposable thumbs.
I can stand for all that stuff, because it makes the game better and more enjoyable. Again, it was all, for the most part, inevitable.
But the one thing I don't have any patience for is performance enhancing drugs. Even the name just doesn't sound right, "performance enhancing." Like something that Arnold Schwarzenegger would have accidently taken in a bad 1980's action movie, only to go on and beat up the bad guys and save the world.
Once again, I want to reiterate one last time that I'm a realist. As a baseball fan, I hate these guys for pumping themselves full of steroids and HGH. I do. But do I blame them? That's another story.
It's hard for me to sit on a throne atop Mt. Pious and say that if some shady Dominican "doctor," offered me a pill, a cream or shake that allowed me to do my job twice as efficiently and in the process, make millions of dollars to support my (currently non-existent) family, that I'd turn it down, because I don't know that I would. And if cheating meant giving your loved one's everything they ever wanted, I bet you'd at least struggle with that decision too.
Again though, it's still cheating. This isn't changing your diet, choosing to work out in the offseason, or quitting cigarettes, booze or cocaine to improve your performance. This is altering the way God made you as a human being, in the process, literally giving you super-human strength.
It's because of this, that players from this era need to be separated in the record books, and separated in the history of baseball. From the guys before them who didn't cheat.
Now with that statement, I know what you're thinking: But Aaaaaaron, everybody from this era hasn't been implicated with performance enhancing drugs, not by a long shot. And you're right.
Randy Johnson entered the league wearing baseball pants with a 26-inch waist, and left the league 20 years later just the same. Greg Maddux did, and still does look like a high school chemistry teacher. Tony Gwynn's idea of "eating healthy," was only ordering Domino's three times a week instead of six. And for all we know, the only thing that gave Derek Jeter super human strength, was slaying an endless conveyor belt of hotties. Which would make us all feel a little stronger I think.
And I get that point, I do. I'm sympathetic to it, and to those ballplayers. But if we've learned anything over the last few years, it's that we really can't trust anybody. Call me pessimistic if you must, but I think that's reality.
Remember, it was less than a year ago that we still thought Manny Ramirez was just an easy going, carefree goofball, who also happened to be a natural born line-drive hitting machine; which to some degree may still be true. But we also learned early last season that he was pumping his body full of women's fertility drugs. Meaning, that at the time, he was either coming down from a steroid cycle, or sometime soon he'll be the first player in Major League history to take maternity leave. You tell me what you think.
Same with the gap-toothed, free-swinging, David Ortiz. Sure he's still the larger than life, huggable, smiling Big Papi. But he just doesn't seem quite as loveable when you think about someone jabbing a syringe into his butt.
Beyond that, look at everything else that's come out over the last few years: Barry Bonds was more or less run out of the sport because a pretty strong steroid case was built against the all-time Home Run king (although to my knowledge, he has never actually failed a test); The two most popular sluggers of the past 20 years (Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa) are tested and caught (and in McGwire's case admitted) cheaters; Maybe the greatest pure athlete in the history of the game is a juicer (Alex Rodriguez); Although Roger Clemens has yet to be formally and officially caught, there's an eyeball high stack of reasons to believe that he cheated (not to mention that just about everything the guy does screams of ‘Roid Rage.'); And of course, Rafael Palmeiro didn't "Use Steroids. Period." Until it was proven he did.
Now does that include everybody in the game? No.
There are a lot of big names that aren't on that list and may have played their careers clean. Or maybe they just didn't get caught.
While I would never imply that someone like Jeter or Gwynn is a user, how is their denial any different than Sosa's was up until last July? Or Palmeiro's in front of a Grand Jury? Didn't those two seem genuine at a certain point too? Didn't you believe Sosa a few years ago when he said that the only thing he put in his body was Flintstones vitamins?
Sure it's a bit unfair to lump everyone together, I understand that. Of course, we also have enough evidence now that steroid users weren't a group of a few clubhouse renegades, but part of a full-fledged epidemic.
But back to the beginning, to where I started this argument.
Babe Ruth and Roger Maris didn't have short porches, watered down pitching staff's and personal dieticians to help them hit 60 home runs in a single season. And they certainly didn't have the ‘cream,' the ‘clear,' or Angel Presinal writing them prescriptions either.
All those guys had, was a whole lot of ambition, mixed in with what God naturally gave them. And apparently it was enough. Today's players already have every inherent built in advantage. Do they really need to change the chemical makeup of their bodies too?
Which is why for the sanctity of the game and its history, we need to put asterisks next to all these records.
I know it may be unfair to a few contemporary players, and I'm sorry for that.
But when you think about it, it's really the only way to be fair to the history of the game. - Aarron Torres, Aaron Torres Sports
MLB records eclipsed during the steroid era SHOULD NOT have asterisks
By Rex Jaybels, i94sports.com: i94sports.com provides in-depth coverage of Chicago and Milwaukee Sports (Bears, Cubs, White Sox, Packers, Brewers) and other interesting sports related tidbits.
 The Era is its Asterisk
When we discuss steroids and how to deal with the aftermath of what has come to be known as the "Steroid Era" we are essentially defining it by one record, the single season home run record. Am I wrong? No other records in professional sports were as well known as the 755 home runs by Hank Aaron or the 61 home runs hit by Roger Maris in 1961, and no other records meant as much to a single sport.
If I were to ask you what the record for rushing yards in a single season was, would you know? If I were to ask you what the record for points in a season in the NBA was, would you know? What about goals in a season for the NHL? What about career totals for any of those?
The home run record was the core of baseball, and when Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa made their run at it in 1998, America took notice and tuned in like they hadn't in many years. People were drawn to baseball again, each rooting for their favorite, the one they could identify with; there was the charismatic Sosa with his big smile and laid back attitude, or McGwire who seemed almost embarrassed by the attention, a big loveable home run hero.
In August of 1998, in the midst of McGwire's run at Maris' mark, a small bottle was found in his locker by reporter Steve Wilstein which contained the drug Androstenedione. The debate began.
Now some 12-years and a few confessions, denials and guilty tests later, it continues, and the question of how to deal with this "era" remains. McGwire himself has asked that we move on, and though I find his attempts to reconcile his actions so many years after the fact absurd and insulting, I can't help but agree. It is time to move on.
Baseball has a long history of defining and re-defining itself. From 1876 to 1900 the rules of the game were in constant flux. Foul balls were not strikes; walks were issued on three balls, then nine, then eight, then seven, then six, then back to seven before finally landing at four. The mound moved from 40-feet to 50 then to 60.5. Pitchers almost always completed their games and thus the single season record for wins by a pitcher stands from 1884, when Old Hoss Radbourn won 59 games for the Providence Grays.
From 1900 to around 1920 baseball entered what we now refer to as the "Dead Ball Era." The ball was almost never swapped out of a game, ball parks were massive and runs were at a premium. The home run was nearly non-existent. "Small ball" was the strategy of the times and stolen bases were the norm. In no other era have teams stolen as many bases as they did in the Dead Ball Era.
Ricky Henderson may be the name you know when it comes to swiping bags, but the single season record holder is Hugh Nicol, who stole 138 in 1887 for the Cincinnati Red Stockings. The only active player in the Top 100 is Jose Reyes, who sits at 70th.
The game was played on spacious fields and while home runs were rare, triples were not. Owen "Chief" Wilson set a record of 36 triples in 1912, a little known number that is likely one of baseball's unbreakable records. As is the 309 career triples of Sam Crawford, set during this time. Curtis Granderson's 23 in 2007 is good for just 22nd on the single season list.
When the public began to grow weary of baseball's low scoring affairs of the early 1900s, the cork centered ball was introduced, and by the early 1920s "trick" pitches were essentially outlawed. Thus began the "Live Ball Era." During this period, on average, nearly ten runs were scored per game. Batting average and home run records were shattered. In 1930, the National League's batting average was over .300 and starting pitchers completed their games just 47% of the time.
During this era, from roughly 1920-1941, a player hit over .400 nine times, including the last to do it, Ted Williams in 1941. The record books show 33 .400 hitters from 1884-1941. It was during this period that Hack Wilson knocked in a record 191 runs for the Chicago Cubs, that Earl Webb doubled a record 67 times and that Babe Ruth had a record 119 extra base hits. Babe Ruth also hits a record 60 home runs in 1927.
During the early part of the 1940s, the game of baseball saw a dilution of talent, when many in the player pool were shipped off to war. Some of the game's greatest saw their careers cut short, in half or put on hold and this undoubtedly had effect on the numbers.
All the while the aforementioned time periods of baseball were missing one element. In 1947, Jackie Robinson became the first black player to play major league baseball since 1884. The Negro Leagues were formed in 1920, but until Robinson, baseball was strictly a white man's game.
During the period from between 1942 and 1960 offense was down, but home runs were still prevalent. Mickey Mantle hits 52 home runs in 1956.
Due to expansion, a new schedule was adopted. 1961 was the first season in baseball history in which 162 games were played in the American League. It was in that same year that Maris broke Babe Ruth's single season home run record, and we might forget that Maris' record itself was given an asterisk when acting Commissioner Ford Frick decided that the record would not stand against Babe Ruth's (his record of 60 had stood since 1927) because it was not done during the same number of games. Maris hit number 61 in game 162, whereas Ruth had done it in 154 games.
Offense continued to decline from 1961-1976 and in response, the mound was lowered in 1969 and in 1973 the Designated Hitter was adopted. During the period from 1977 to 1993, there were times when nearly one-third of teams played on artificial turf fields which lead to an increased emphasis on scoring via doubles, triples, and stolen bases rather than a relying on the homerun.
Enter the mid-90's. Baseball's popularity is again on the decline and a strike has devastated the game. Small ball-parks are becoming trendy, strength and conditioning are revolutionizing the game, relief pitchers are being used more than ever, and as we would learn, steroids are becoming widely used in club houses all over the majors. Starting pitchers now finish roughly 8% of their games.
Oh, and chicks dig the long ball.
This little trip down history lane in baseball does have a point. What happened, happened. In the late 1800s the mound moved frequently and the pitchers weren't allowed to throw overhand, the batters used flat bats, and the same ball was used the entire game, and those records still stand, no asterisks.
In the early 1900s pitchers scuffed the balls, players bet on and altered games intentionally, they stole bases at record paces and those records still stand, no asterisks.
Until 1947 no African-American or Latin players were allowed in major league baseball, and those records still stand, no asterisks.
You get the idea.
These are periods, defining moments in baseball history, much like the "Steroid Era". That label will be its mark, or its stain, much like the dead ball era, much like baseball before integration and much like the expansion era. We don't need asterisks to remind us of this.
The records books are exactly that, a recording of what happened. When we look back at the numbers and see 63, 64, 65, 66, 70, 73 and 762 (this is essentially what we are discussing are we not) we will know how they got there. To put an asterisk on them would be to deny that they were accomplished amongst a league of suspects.
I don't condone what happened, but it did, and the record books reflect it already. - Rex Jaybels, i94sports.com
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