Sunday, April 2, 2006

A Market Solution to Baseball’s “Asterisk” Problem

As the MLB season opens today, one of the league’s hyped stories is Philadelphia shortstop Jimmy Rollins’ hitting streak. Rollins hit in the last 36 games of the 2005 season; his streak is now the ninth longest in baseball history; with 21 more games-with-hits he will break the one record in baseball that no one thought would be broken: Joe D’s 56-game hitting streak. Oh wait, no he won’t. According to MLB, “If he succeeds, Rollins will be recognized as the holder of the longest hitting streak in Major League history, though DiMaggio will keep the single-season mark.” In other words, Rollins will have a record, but one with an asterisk – much like the asterisk (formerly) on Roger Maris’s single-season homerun record. The Rollins asterisk makes some sense; hits in games at the end of a season (in which teams may be out of contention, or resting players in advance of playoff runs, and thus not deploy their best pitchers and fielders) are not the same as hits in July. Depending on how baseball’s investigation of Barry Bonds ends up, if Bonds breaks the lifetime homerun mark he may have his record *’d as well (* = Bonds was possibly juiced up while hitting a good number of these homers).

I understand baseball’s recent fascination with record-breaking performances. After all, the memorable McGwire-Sosa contest was one of the most important factors in curing baseball of its post-strike blues. Pitching Rollins’s possible “record breaking*” season is an obvious PR ploy aimed at distracting the public from the ongoing steroid investigation.

Instead of adding *’s after records, some of which are defensible while others are not, MLB should get out of the business of assigning “official” record-holder status to any of its current or former players, and ignore that records exist or are broken. Instead, MLB should let the market decide which are the “definitive” records and who holds them. Various private companies, with a profit motive, can offer their own “definitive” records for public and media consumption. Guinness can get in the game; so can U.S. News and World Report. Bonds may break the career home-run record; but if the public “rejects” that record as definitive (or rejects Rollins’ multi-season streak as being a streak at all) by way of choices made by the market, MLB won't need to slap Bonds with a *.

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