Today’s Washington Post notes the differences between 1974 and 2007:
It was a different moment in a different era, a rainy spring night in Atlanta, April 8, 1974, when Henry Aaron, one of the last players to make it from the Negro Leagues into Major League Baseball, sent a ball arching into myth and the Southern darkness.
One in every four televisions in America — from San Diego to Bangor, from Seattle to Key West, from the dark of the Nebraska plains to the single-bulb glare of walk-ups in Harlem — was tuned to the game. President Richard Nixon, mired in Watergate, stopped to watch.
715.
Aaron’s shot to left broke the most hallowed record in American sport, Babe Ruth’s home run record of 714. It was a number known by every schoolboy, in every sandlot. Exceeding it was unthinkable. You couldn’t break the record of a god.
Ruth, who had out-homered entire teams — season after season. Ruth, the hard-knock kid from a Baltimore orphanage who had become a superstar known by his first name, often prefaced with “the.” The Babe. He was the “patron saint of American possibility,” in the phrase of one biographer. His last name became an adjective, Ruthian, deriving from Herculean, to denote an achievement worthy of the ancient Greeks.
And now, on the outer edge of the civil rights era, the patron saint of another sort of American possibility, Hank Aaron, was circling the bases. The nation, cheering, weeping, ecstatic, dumbfounded, watched a black man jog into the realm of folklore.
715.
It was like seeing John Henry drive steel.
In the coming days or weeks, Barry Bonds will almost certainly break Aaron’s home run record of 755, and this time, it will matter very little. Most of the nation (outside of Bonds’s home park in San Francisco) will watch with ambivalence, if not bellowed disdain.
Part of the reason is because baseball doesn’t hold the same place in the national consciousness that it did even 30 years ago, but the bigger part of it is because of the perception, mostly accurate I would submit, that Bonds’ achievement is clouded by the fact that he used performance enhancing drugs.
Reaching the record wasn’t easy for Hank Aaron, either. As a black man in the 1970’s there were still people who didn’t like the idea that he would break a record attained by a white man (notwithstanding the rumors that Babe Ruth himself was part African-American).
But it’s different with Bonds.
People think that he cheated his way to the record. And, if you consider taking drugs that increase your muscle mass cheating, then they’re probably right.
