I'm watching the beginning of the baseball season with some dismay this year. Home runs are flying out of the parks with record frequency. The reasons for the phenomenon? Steroid use and body building by players, and emphasis on home runs as the only way to hit, a pumped up baseball this year because of the belief that fans want to see homers, smaller ballparks, a shortage of good pitching with the vastly expanded major leagues. Well, I'm sure it is all of those things.

It is a bit disappointing to me to see light weights who look like singles hitters to me, hitting fly balls off the end of the bat that carry over the wall. Records from other eras will crumble and fall. We'll say that Babe Ruth was no Barry Bonds! And that is true. Ruth played in the dead ball era. However they made it, it just didn't go as far. Bats weren't the same either, nor was body building. "Weight lifting" meant that during the off season you had a manual labor job. Ruth, of course did pretty well. When confronted with the fact that he made more money than president Calvin Coolidge and asked how he felt about that, he said "I think I had a better year than he did."

If you want to compare a modern player to Ruth, try this standard. In 1927 when Ruth hit his record 60 home runs, no other TEAM in the American league hit that many. So when McGuire or Sosa or Bonds or Pujols hit more than all the other teams in their league, let's call attention to that. When Ruth retired he held the records for career homeruns, runs batted in, extra-base hits, walks, on base percentage, and slugging average. His records stood for decades. When one of the current crop of bombers accomplishes something like that, it will be clear for everyone to see, but it is not on the horizon in the near future. So the next time you see that newsreel footage of the Babe's round figure swinging a huge piece of lumber and then trotting around the bases, don't forget to be awe struck at the image. How did he do it? His daughter, Julia Ruth Stevens, is still alive today at 88.

Thanks AJC for reminding me.