A Career in Any League

“Nostalgia is a sadness without an object, a sadness which creates a longing that of necessity is inauthentic because it does not take part in lived experience. Rather, it remains behind and before that experience… the past it seeks has never existed except as narrative.”

-Susan Stewart

“There was a time. That time is gone.”

-Jay Farrar

Naïve as I was back in 2006, I found myself hoping Alex Rodriguez would stay healthy the rest of his career and break the all-time home run record. I was not an A-Rod fan. His stint in Arlington only confirmed what I already suspected, that this was a young man with enormous talent, and a mind utterly devoid of any interesting or challenging thought to go along with it. Bill Lee A-Rod definitely ain’t. Like so many people thrust into the limelight who aren’t terribly bright, Rodriguez quickly became all about Rodriguez, a boring, annoying amalgamation of ego and image that, as such, was tailor-made for the New York Yankees. Rodriguez’ trade to the Yankees in February 2004 quickly seemed almost inevitable: one of the league’s most unlikable players now starting for the league’s most unlikable team.

Still, there I was in 2006, calling my best friend, naïvely telling him I hoped A-Rod would stay healthy the rest of his career and break the all-time home run record. Standing front and center in this incongruous change in attitude stood the 6’1” lefty from Riverside, CA: Barry Bonds. The fatigue from what we now call the Steroid Era, from watching men like Bonds, McGuire and Sosa, who came up as skinny kids and then retired as bloated, alien-looking hulks, demolishing all the mythical baseball numbers in the span of nine years, had finally broken me. Bonds disposed of McGuire’s single-season home run record in 2001 with 73, and by 2006 was well on his way to breaking Aaron’s career record. Both Bonds and McGuire used steroids to accomplish these feats. It was too much to take: the humble, intelligent Aaron endures death threats on his way to well-deserved immortality, and the ignorant, exceedingly unpleasant Bonds uses performance-enhancing drugs to break that mythical record. Aaron, the apex of strength; Bonds, the nadir or self-obsession.

So even though Rodriguez makes me want to vomit, I figured it would be a hoot for Bonds, his shriveled testicles and gruesome, oversized head to break the record, strut around for a few years thinking he was the shit, only to have it broken very quickly by this other dumbass he hadn’t seen in his rearview mirror. Then 2009 rolled around, and Selena Roberts and David Epstein broke the news of A-Rod’s steroid use.

***

Here’s what happened in 1980: I got home with a couple packages of Topps baseball cards, rifled through the cards, looked at the pictures and the stats, and went to bed that night. And the next night. And then got up on Saturday, did my chores, and had this nagging in my head, a number that kept appearing in daydreams, the feeling that I had to confirm I really saw what didn’t seem possible.

So back I went to George Foster’s card, flipped it over and for the first time seriously fixed my eyes on his 1977 stats: 52 HR, 149 RBI. Fifty-two. Deficient as I was in all things sports, I knew enough about what constituted a good hitter, and what constituted a power hitter. 52 in the HR column wasn’t the sort of thing that went on very often. Once every 10 or 15 years, in fact; no one had hit over 50 since Mays in’65, and no one would do so again until Cecil Fielder in ’90. This stat went beyond mere power. If you hit 20 homers a year, you had some power. 40+ home runs? You were truly one of the elite, one of the veritable gods that kids like me looked up to in wondrous awe. Here was something transcending a good season, something historic that happened in my own lifetime, not some ancient statistic from the fabled days of the Babe or Christy Mathewson: 52.

There’s no more awe in the post-Steroid Era when numbers like 52 HR wind up in a stats column. After living through the sham perpetrated by McGuire, Sosa and Bonds, I imagine lots of kids look at the kinds of numbers put up by someone like José Bautista in 2011 and shrug their shoulders; put him in the clean-up slot. He’ll drive in some runs.

But there was a time, kids. There was a time when Bautista’s 41 home runs would have stirred the playground chatter before school in 6^th grade, because it meant something. There was a time when I went back to school on Monday with my George Foster card in hand, excitedly talking to anyone who’d listen about this man who put up god-like numbers in 1977, who was a major BADASS even without 52 home runs, what with those chops and piercing eyes – the kind of guy who actually seemed scary to me as I looked at his card (what is Foster thinking, I thought, looking at the card? What does a guy who hits 52 fucking home runs need to think? If I were a pitcher I’d just walk him. Fuck it.) – and who looked like a NORMAL HUMAN BEING. Dig it. No freakishly-huge forehead, no un-humanly mammoth arms that at once looked muscular and flabby. Now 63, Foster let himself go and packed on some pounds recently, but as a twenty-something slugger, he was a regular, healthy looking ballplayer: lean and athletic.

George Foster never hit 50 home runs in a season again. In ’78 he crushed 40, and then averaged 21 dingers a season for the rest of his career. He was never elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame. There are those who would point to the power drop-off as proof that Foster was only ever an average ballplayer with one aberrant season. These are the snobs that think you’ve failed unless you single-handedly alter the trajectory of human existence. Here, then, is the crux of the steroid era: individual players aiming not for a ring or some good numbers, but for universe-defying, mind-blowing, world-altering numbers, for the season and then their careers. It’s not enough to be the kind of power hitter kids like me used to admire 35 years ago. You have to change history itself, and command the kind of allegiance that God himself demands of his abject, groveling subjects.

Those who look at 1977 as a baseball footnote for George Foster are the kinds of pea-brained idiots who cannot even dimly comprehend the significance of that critical exchange towards the end of Bull Durham:

“Nuke, you know who this is? This is Sandy Grimes. Sandy Grimes hit .371 in Louisville in 1965.”

“.376.”

“I’m sorry. He hit .376. That’s a career, man. In any league.”

It’s a precious memory for me, talking to my brother, a Cincinnati Reds fan from birth, about the mighty George Foster and his fifty-two home runs. The kind of precious, once-in-a-lifetime memory kids growing up in the 2000s will never have, used – as they are – to numbers like 70 and 65 (McGuire), 66, 63 and 64 (Sosa), 73 and 762 (Bonds). They’ll never know what it was like growing up with the real numbers, what it was like when 52 in the HR column – not a steroids-fueled 65 – was a source of wonderment.

And precious memories, finally, are exactly what fuel the falsehoods, the empty facade of nostalgia. Yes indeedy, there’s nothing worse than some curmudgeonly geezer starting in on the clichéd “When I was your age…” spiel. I know, I know; kids nowadays shouldn't even be expected to grow up with my awe of Foster. That was 30 years ago. And of course anyone who grew up fifty years ago would feed me the same line: You think 1977 and Foster were cool? Hell, when I was your age… On and on it goes, with each new generation.

I agree: there are no Good Old Days. There are just days. And if you had a good childhood – loving family, great friends – then you reach your 40s and things from 30 years ago seem lovely indeed, better than all the bullshit you’re putting up with now. You can find men and women from every generation going back 200 years thinking this way.

Allow me to take the low road, though, and point out that I’m right on this one. There really was a time when a guy who hadn’t been shooting steroids into his veins hit 52 home runs over the course of a season. And it was amazing. It was the kind of thing that made headlines. So it’ll never really be the same, will it? As it was in 1980, I mean. Because no matter what we do with their numbers – assign asterisks to them, remove them altogether, or define them as legit – the dark shadows of Bonds, McGuire and Sosa will forever chill baseball’s history and numbers like a late blast of arctic wind on a mid-April day.

It’s fucked up. Sometimes I wonder if my memories of 1980 are all I’ve got left with this damn game.