The baseball theory of relativity

FOR Major League Baseball, 2017 has been a season of extremes. The Los Angeles Dodgers went on a tear, winning 84 percent of the time in one 67-game stretch. Then they lost all but one of their next 17 games. The Cleveland Indians won 22 straight games, an American League record, before losing on Friday night.

Much of the baseball world’s attention, though, is on one player: Giancarlo Stanton, who plays right field for the Miami Marlins. He has been hitting home runs at a pace worthy of

Roy Hobbs in The Natural – 54 of them going into the weekend. That has put him at the centre of debates among the sport’s devotees.

The question about Stanton is what to do should he hit 62 homers, a challenging goal with only two weeks left in the regular season.

He would top an old record of 61 set in 1961 by Roger Maris, who surpassed the 60 that Babe Ruth hit in 1927. But isn’t the real record well out of reach – the 73 homers that Barry Bonds hit in 2001? That is so. But Bonds has long laboured under suspicions that he sailed to his 73 on a tide of performance-enhancing drugs. A similar taint clings to Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa, both of whom also outdid Maris in the steroid-fuelled 1990s and early 2000s.

One argument is that if Stanton hits 62, he deserves to be recognised as the record holder – a man who, like Maris, is unsullied by intimations of skullduggery. But now for another favourite pastime of fans: whataboutery.

What about the fact that ballparks are smaller today and thus cosier for power hitters than they used to be? What about Maris hitting his 61 in a longer season than Ruth had, and at a time when pitching strength was diluted by expansion?

Oh yeah, and what about Ruth having it easier because he never had to face great pitchers like Satchel Paige or Bob Gibson because African Americans could not play in the major leagues then?

The barroom quarreling can go on and on. As for Ruth and his 60 dingers, let’s simply note that he was a fellow of prodigious appetites.

He hit a lot of high balls, and drank a lot of highballs. How can you not admire someone who accomplished so much while under the influence of performance-hindering drugs?