Bonds may break the poetry of baseball stats

Tainted by steroid scandals, Barry Bonds's impending historic home run may not soar in the public's estimation.

from the July 25, 2007 edition

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Following in its nihilistic path, the audacious notion that the Encyclopedia might be the perfect desert-island book will be unofficially rained out. Canceled. Written off. Rip up the tickets.

Equally troubling to me is the fact that the ruination is not just for the baseball faithful who live and breathe nuances of ERAs, RBIs, and OBPs, but for Hazard's remarkable poem about the good book. As 756 soars over the fence any day now, Hazard's poem will immediately lose its tension, its rhythmic edge, its subtext. It becomes a called third strike. Stick it in some unreadable literary anthology and close the cover.

In that inglorious moment, the debate will focus on whether to put an asterisk next to Mr. Bonds's record, a way of acknowledging that the jaw-dropping achievement, was in all likelihood tainted. The baseball trinity – the commissioner, owners, and players – will be caught in an inescapable and humiliating rundown between third and home in what will inevitably be the last out of the statistics game.

But asterisk or no asterisk, when Bonds hits No. 756, all the sacred records will be rendered meaningless. The number itself will have lost its magical quality.

Just as the great Yogi Berra foretold, the game, which is never over until it's over, will be over. No way to make any sense of the numbers and no way to take them on faith. Without the holy statistics, baseball really is just a game after all, and Hazard's poem, "Its garland briefer than a girl's."

• Steven Lewis is a freelance writer and the author of the forthcoming "Fear and Loathing of Boca Raton: A Hippies' Guide to the Second Sixties."

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