I heard Chris Rock give one of the best replies to the whole “should Barry Bonds’ home run record have an asterisk” question.  He said, sure, if you put one next to Babe Ruth’s name.  He had 714 affirmative action home runs, he never played against black guys.

I think that is brilliant and a perfect encapsulation of my feelings towards the whole thing.  Different eras in baseball have different negative parts of the game.  In Babe’s era it was segregated, in Bond’s era there are performance enhancing drugs.  They both may have benefited from these negatives.  I say “may have” because Bond’s has never failed an MLB drug test.  Babe definitely benefited from not playing against all the best players out there.  So to talk of an asterisk is just silly and simple-minded.

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 5th, 2007 at 7:36 pm and is filed under baseball, sports. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.