Letters to the Editor
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Timbucktom: I gave you an opportunity and you were MIA HOWEVER I will accept your
IVY leaf and give you my email planeidea@msn.com. Please send me an email and we can see what becomes of this.
Of course I already know who you are BTW...
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debaser; try harder your logic is as weak as Babe's HR record plus it is not racist to be
factula and honest. Black athletes are better in some sports that whites for a nuber of reasons including the fact of racism on this soil you are seeking to deflect.
Now take another swing....lol,lol,lol
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Too Late Now For 6pm - Your Fault - But...
Let's meet and talk. Let's make everything very public here. If you do not want public, I do not trust you, and cannot bother with you.
If you were writing in good faith, you could have/would have resposnded sooner.
You did not send me that e-mail address. You gave it to somebody else. I just saw it. Look at your inbox.
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@Anonymous 2:42
I was on the fence regarding how much I agreed with King's point, but you just convinced me how right he really is. Some events really do require more distance than others in order to see them in the proper context of history.
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*
I heard that the person who caught (or wrestled according to the video!)the homer ball could get up to 1/2 million dollars for it.
If I had the money, I'd buy the ball, stamp it with an asterisk, and donate it to the Smithsonian.
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@Downpuppy - Dwight Evans
Dwight Evans was 29 when he suddenly became a top slugger. From 1972-1980 he was a middling hitter with a good arm; from 1981-1989 he had patience, power and one of the strangest stances ever.
He did get better as he got older, but not by a real order of magnitude. Other than a standout year in '87, his SLG% bounced between .450 and .490 when he was 33-37, barely different from the numbers he put up age 23-28 (mostly around .450, but up to .526). He became a better hitter, but he didn't really develop tons more power.
Since 1990, there've been lots: Terry Pendleton & Tony Phillips were both defensive specialists who turned into offensive forces after changing teams.
I'll have to think about Pendleton, although to be fair, his improvement was from 12-12 HR power to 20 HR power. His walks also went down and K's went up, suggesting that this really might have been a different approach. Even so, by ages 32-33 he was back on the serious decline.
I'll give you Phillips though, with just the caveat that he still only had one season of more than 20 HR. He really does look different later in his career. Still, this side of the ledger looks light; particularly hard to find are guys that made the big, sustained jump from good/very good to great at that age in terms of power.
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yojimbo_7
A-rod is going to break BB's record any way. He's 32 and has 500 HRs. Hell he might hit a 1,000.
And what about Griffey? If he'd been healthy these past many years, we would probably be celebrating HIS accomplishments any day now as well.
Here's to A-rod and Griffey making short work of this *record.
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@talk2me
You desereve a star for that asterisk post. You would get about a $half million tax exemption for your charitable donation. It would wipe out your income taxes for the next few years. Cheers!
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Apples to...
To this nonsense that Bonds is some kind of late career freak. Bonds was 36 when he hit his career high number of Home Runs while Aaron was 37 years old when he hit his career high. This is definitive proof that Aaron is a cheater.
Hey, look, an apple and an orange! Let's compare them!
Aaron's career high that you mention (47) did indeed surpass the 44 he hit as a 23 year old and 45 that he hit as a 28 year old. He had 4 40-homer seasons before 30 and 4 after. He was the model of consistency, really.
Bonds had 1 40 homer season before age 30, 7 after. Instead of surpassing his previous best by 2 HR, he surpassed it by 24 HR. His SLG for each year 35-39 was better than anything he did before, by a lot. However he did it (must be the shoes), he showed a massive improvement of a sort unprecedented until quite recently, when it suddenly became a bit more common all at once.
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Assterisk
A year ago there was Sports Illusrated Article about Bonds. I was about to go do something so I only had time to look at the pictures. Among them were photos of fans with signs featuring asterisks.
I did not realize at the time that those were asterisks. As I went to work, I thought about just what those signs may have been saying. The only explanation that came to mind was that they were using the "sphincter" illustrations from Kurt Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions, and were thus calling Bonds an anus. I was totally puzzled that these sports fans would make a sign with a relatively obscure literary reference of sorts on it.
Of course it eventually dawned on me what the asterisk was when I thought about Roger Maris. But the number w/asterisk really says it all:
756*
Prolific Home Run Hitter
Cheater
Asshole
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Damianus...
...is right on. To add to this:
Bonds’ outlandish HR totals in recent years have come despite being walked more frequently that any player in history. Had he been pitched to at a rate comparable to that of other power hitters - say, McGuire and Sosa circa 1998 – who knows how many he might have hit in a season. 80? 90? Would you be so ambivalent about an 85 home run season?
One thing I noticed last night when looking over his career stats: the year he hit 73, almost HALF of his hits that year were dingers! 156 hits - 73 of them yard. Ahem.
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timbucktom: You are the one who is seeking my audience.. You are the one who got
so animated in here and has obessed over my comments. You issued the intial negative attack simply because my posts have power and cause reaction.
I do not hide. I have a public personality not you.
You were MIA. I have provide you with a conduit either step up or stay angry...
I make a difference do YOU!
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Kiss My Asterisk, Hypocrites
If every athlete in the past twenty years in major American sports were banished, we'd be left with the WNBA. Bonds was pitched to,when they had the stones to actually throw strikes, were thrown by enhanced pitchers, and the balls that stayed in the park were caught by enhanced fielders. Most estimates are that far more than 50% of major league baseball players have "used" at one time or another. Brady Anderson, anyone? If taking enhancers makes you superman, where the hell are the rest of the records? Only three players in baseball history have three hundred or more homers and stolen bases: Andre Dawson, Bobby Bonds, and Barry Bonds. The 400/400 and 500/500 clubs have one member: Barry Bonds. Even assuming you hypocrites are correct, and that his later statistics have been somewhat inflated, no one in 120 years of major league ball can come within a country mile of Bonds. Seven MVPs, nine gold gloves- those are all because of steriods, right? Where weere you jerks during the big celebration over the race between McGuire and Sosa? Kiss my asterisk.