755. It ain't no 56 or .400

The baseball of my youth was a beautiful game of rock solid numbers. 61, 715, 755, 300, 500, 3000, etc. That started to erode in 1989. 4,191 had fallen, and with it fell the man who broke the all time hits record. When Pete Rose was banned from baseball, the all time hits record became the unspoken record of baseball. In 1998, 61 fell to Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa. We all cheered it then because we didn't quite grasp yet what Mark and Sammy injected themselves with to get there. Bonds followed, breaking McGwire's single season home run record, and now those numbers are meaningless, too. Last night, Bonds hit his 711th career home run. Soon enough, he will pass Hank Aaron and establish a new number for baseball lore, but like the single season home run record and the career hits record, the number will be stripped of any meaning. We will be left with two batting records that have meaning, numbers which controversy can only do so much to tarnish, and those numbers are 56 and .400.