Plain English with Derek Thompson - Bill Simmons on Aaron Judge, How Baseball Ruined Itself, and the Joy of Debating Sports Records

Episode Date: October 6, 2022

This week, the Yankees' Aaron Judge hit his 62nd home run of the season, and it’s triggered a ferocious debate that has a lot of people very worked up over a deceptively simple question: Who is baseball’s home run king? In 2001, Barry Bonds hit 73 home runs. In 2022, Judge hit 62 home runs. Seventy-three is more than 62. Those are facts. But Barry Bonds used steroids. Other sports, like cycling, have stripped athletes of records and championships if they’re caught doping. Lance Armstrong won seven Tour de France titles but was stripped of all of them. So, what do we do about Bonds and his fellow dopers, like Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa? Do we consider their records illegitimate? If so, Aaron Judge is the single-season home run king. Or do we say, you can’t just selectively erase history? In which case, Judge doesn’t have any major record. He’s just a big, tall guy who had a very nice season. You might think: OK, who cares what words we use to talk about baseball? The answer is: I care! There was a period in my life when debating baseball stats and baseball history was literally my favorite activity in the world. My identity as a fifth grader was being the baseball stats guy. And also, a lot of people care. This debate over who is the legitimate single-season home run king has been hands down the most fun baseball discourse I can remember in maybe 20 years. Today’s guest is Bill Simmons. We talk about MLB history, the joy of debating records, how baseball ruined itself, and who is really baseball’s home run king. Host: Derek Thompson Guest: Bill Simmons Producer: Devon Manze Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I'm Yossi Salick, and I'm the host of Bansplain, a show where we explain cult bands and iconic artists by going deep into their histories and discographies. We're back with a brand new season at our brand new home, the Ringer podcast network, tackling a whole new batch of artists, from grunge gods to power pop pioneers to new metal legends and many, many more. Listen to new episodes every Thursday, only on Spotify. Today's episode is about baseball. baseball and records and what we talk about when we talk about sports history. This week, the Yankees Aaron Judge hit his 62nd home run of the year, and it has triggered a ferocious and I think very, very fun debate that has a lot of people very worked up over a deceptively simple question.

Who is baseball's true home run king? So, well, let's start with a few simple facts. In 2001, Barry Bonds hit 73 home runs. In 2022, Aaron Judge hit 60s. 62 home runs. 73 is more than 62. Those are facts. Here are some more facts.

Barry Bonds used steroids. We know this. Other sports like cycling have stripped athletes of records and championships if they're caught doping. Lance Armstrong won seven Twitter France titles. He was stripped of all of them. Baseball hasn't stripped Barry Bonds of his stats because I don't know how you would do that. It doesn't make any sense. But it has kept him out of the Hall of Fame because of a steroid use.

So what do we do when we talk about baseball history? when we talk about Bonds and his fellow dopers like Mark McGuire, Sammy Sosa, do we consider their records illegitimate? If so, Aaron Judge is the single season home run king. Or do we say, no, you can't selectively erase history, in which case Aaron Judge doesn't hold any major record right now. He's just a big, tall guy who had a very nice season. Now, you might think, okay, Derek, who cares what words we use to talk about baseball?

The answer is, I care. I care very much. a period in my life when debating baseball stats and baseball history was literally my favorite activity in the world. My entire identity as a middle schooler was wrapped up in being baseball stat guy. And also, a lot of people today care. A lot of adults today care. This debate over who is the legitimate single-season home run king has been hands down the most fun, the most combative, the most ferocious baseball discourse I can remember in 20 years. Today's guest is Bill Simmons.

This is typically the part of the open where I do like a brief bio of the guest. I will not be doing that today. Bill and I talk about bonds, judge, baseball history, the role of records, who the true home run king is, and why these kind of debates are so much damn fun in the first place. I'm Derek Thompson. This is plain English. Bill Simmons, great to see you. Great to be here.

I'm so proud of this podcast. I remember when we were spitball on what it might look like and it came out exactly how we hoped and I think it's been really valuable. We love having it. I love listening to it. So congrats.

Thank you so much. It's been a blast to do. And it's funny, I'm thinking back to this is the 99th episode of this show and I'm thinking back to just almost a year ago when you were thinking about what to name the show.

And I threw out a bunch of names to you and Sean and Juliet and plain English is one of them. And you were like, yeah, plain English. I can kind of see people saying, I listen to plain English. And in a weird way, it like shaped the show. Like, I don't know what the show would have been

if we had named it some other thing, but like having that North Star of, oh, plain English. I should probably try to explain complicated ideas in simple language. Right. It was sort of revelatory for pulling the whole thing together. So thank you for really naming it or co-naming it. Well, it's worked out.

great. The only thing is, I feel like I've lost you on my podcast because you're always doing a lot of the topics I would have brought you on, but that's fine. I'm happy to sacrifice my podcast to create an awesome one. So it's good to be here. Excellent. So before we get into this and debate who the true home run king is, I do want to foreground this entire conversation by saying, this is fun, like an actual emotional debate about baseball. This is fun. I feel like I've been reading takes about bonds and judge that are like getting my blood boiling. And the most important thing here is not in fact the correctness of the takes. It might be the fact that baseball has for the first time in 20 years had an effect on my blood pressure. It feels good to like get emotionally invested

in a baseball debate. So you've been watching the takes fly. Is Aaron Judge the single season home run king? Is he the legitimate home run king? Is he the American League home run king, a new category that was basically just invented 30 minutes ago. The stage is yours. What do you make of this beautiful mess? It is a beautiful mess. It is fun to hear people have actual baseball arguments. I think this really was what baseball was pretty boring. Baseball was pretty stat-driven. Baseball was about just kind of arguing about stuff. What pitcher was better than what pitcher? Could this picture have gone or another era? Like the old, I always mentioned this, but Jeter versus Nomar in the late 90s, early 2000s, when we didn't have the stats yet, we used to really argue about

that. And I think basketball has replaced a lot of that stuff with the arguments, because even though we have the stats in basketball, it's only five people, you have an effect on your teammates, and there's no, there's stats that quantify it to some degree, but there's no way to quantify some of the stuff that happens in basketball. In baseball, we can quantify every single little piece of it. Right? And I think that's made it less fun. It's less fun because the games have gotten longer.

I think kids have grown up to not be fans as adults because the games were not the right time. We know all the reasons. But what is happening with this judge thing was one of the things we loved about baseball. I remember being in cars with my friends and we would, you know, one time I was in the car going to a Mets Red Sox game with my buddy Gus Ramsey and his dad, Wally, who used to be my English teacher. And that was when he came up with my buddy, Gus's dad, came up with the idea of the pyramid

because we were trying to rank the greatest players and the next level. And I took it and that ended up, I wrote about it. And then that eventually became part of my book. But it was the kind of thing you did with baseball. You were always comparing players to other players. And that's been lost. Now you have the second piece that comes in, which is people have become moral arbiters, which that ties in all the stuff you care about.

right, like how the rise of social media, the rise of just people being online all day, the rise of take culture, all these different. So people come in now off the top rope, they're like, no, this is the real home run record. This is the non-steroid record. First of all, we have no idea who's using and not using in any sport that we're watching now. And anytime somebody tests like Tatis, it's like, oh my God, Tatiste, I can't believe it. Well, that was one of the best part is baseball, and he tested positive. So for people to think this is a non-steroids error, non-HGH error, not anything era, we don't know. We definitely don't know in basketball. We know the guys in football and basketball are way more durable and they play way longer. And all of us are like,

wow, amazing. They really work in their bodies. Like, we're doing all the same stuff everyone did in the late 90s with like, wow, these home runs. These are great. Nothing going on here. But my big thing is that bonds never actually cheated. He cheated, but he didn't. There were no rules in place. So if you say I didn't get a speeding ticket on the highway when I went 120, but I was speeding and I didn't get a ticket and nobody caught me, I wasn't speeding. I know that's a terrible argument, but it's a fact. There were no rules in place. This was the whole problem with baseball. He cheated because McGuire and Sosa became national heroes for cheating. And he was like, fuck this. I'm the best player in baseball and I have been the whole decade.

and nobody cares about me, they're going to cheat. Watch this. And there were no rules of place. You made two points that I want to dig into. The first is that I totally agree that statistics or analytics ruined baseball. And they ruined it maybe in two ways. One, they took away an aspect of that

sort of impressionistic debate that you could have with people in a car, coming up with things like pyramids, debating Nomar versus Jeter in a way that wasn't just totally infused with a bunch of nerd guys. Interacting with humans. Interacting with humans.

But it also had the second order effect, which is that I think analytics hurt baseball in a way that it didn't necessarily hurt the experience of watching basketball and football. Because the way that analytics impacted the way baseball was played is that it created a shift which took away singles from a lot of hitters. That encouraged hitters to have more of an angle on their swing. People in charge of pitching said, you know what? Instead of having one pitcher, like go later. into a game. Let's have like seven different pitchers in a game throw 99 miles an hour. So now batting

averages plummet and all the ways that little bitty analytics and Sabremetrics affected baseball reduced offensive firepower. But you compare that to basketball and football. What did analytics do? It made the NBA a huge three point game, which increased the total number of points. In the NFL, it's opened up the passing offense. So we're seeing statistical performances among quarterbacks. It's unlike anything we saw 20 years ago. So you're right that at the sort of conversational level, analytics was bad for baseball, but maybe even more importantly,

and this is not necessarily the subject of this show, I just think it's a great point. Like the injection of analytics into baseball made it more boring in a way that I don't think it necessarily made basketball and football more boring, just quickly to respond to that. Well, baseball became math.

Yeah, right. And not in a fun way. It's just like, who's the best player? I will calculate his war. Oh, Trout had the highest war by far. He's the MVP. It's like, what's fun of it? about that. You just playing English me. I gave a long-winded paragraph and you summarized it in one

sentence. You're exactly right. That's never fun. It's not fun for kids. It's fun for a certain type of person who's very, very analytic and mathy and, you know, wants everything to have an answer. In football, I think the statistical revolution has been incredibly additive. It's made the made the sport way easier understand. It's made it more fun to gamble on. It's made it more fun to try to compare teams versus the I test. And everything they have now, I think, has been 100% additive. Basketball, on the one hand, it's helped us on, I remember in my book, I was very dismissive of some of the stats. I was just like, I just don't think you're going to be able to quantify Shane Batier, what he does, what makes him important. But it turns out we had stats that quantify,

and that was my friend Darrell Morey was telling me, I have the, those stats. Why do you think I'd traded for Shane Batti? It's like, well, if you have those stats, why don't we have those stats? And there was this dark era from, I would say, 0506 range NBA all the way through maybe about 1213, where the teams had the stats, but we didn't. And the teams had the stuff that was cutting edge, but we didn't. And in the last seven, eight years, now we have the stats. We have all the second spectrum stuff. We have all these different five-man lineups, all these different things. And they're really helpful. It's like, the Celtics, look at this lineup with Robert Williams, Tatum, Brown, Marcus Smart, and Grant Williams.

That is way better than any of the five-man lineup, and here's the data. But you could also argue, all right, well, what if they're playing Golden State? And that lineup doesn't work. And there's variables to it. In baseball, the variables just died. And it just became, oh, right against lefty. He's sitting 205 against lefties. This guy's got a 201 ERA against Ritees, and these two should just go against.

each other and the right he's going to lose. What's fun about that? Nothing. We need a word that means the dark side of Moneyball. Something like my friend Conner Sen, I think, called it data dulling. The way that the introduction of data to an industry, it could be baseball, it could be movies, it could be television, it could be anything. The way that the introduction of data to that industry makes the content duller, more predictable. It turns art into math. I absolutely think that is one factor in the demise of baseball as a conversation topic, an obsession for me, a point of interest in, you know, television audiences, it's a huge part I think of its decline. Well, there's one other piece with it too.

Baseball was around for an incredibly long time, right? And going back to the 1800s and the Syong era and Babe Ruth and all the stuff you did, it still allowed us to compare the different eras in like a reasonable way, right? You could go back. I used to play what if baseball, me and, a few friends in the early 2000s. We would play, we would make teams, and there would be OBP guys from different eras.

There would be great whip guys from different eras. And it had its dollar moments. Like in the 60s, we had the, where they had to raise the mound because guys like Gibson and Denny McLean were just like running havoc. And it just, it wasn't fun. Every game was 2-1, 1-0, 3-2. Before 1947, we had really no minorities at all playing baseball.

Got to factor that in. in from, I would say, 89 through 2005 steroids have to factor that. And then it goes up a level with the home run stats. And now we're in this weird era of like the three outcome era. And to me, I did this when I did my book.

Like you almost can't compare the eras as much as compare the people in their specific eras. You know? So if we're looking at bonds, you have to compare them to everyone else from 89 to 2006. And if you're looking at Judge now, who has, what, 20 homers more than anybody he plays against, that's amazing. That's the best case for this might be one of the great offensive seasons ever, where his

stats are just way different than everyone else's. Now, we were in the same trouble with Bonds with his stats are different than everyone else's, and then it turned out he was cheating. I don't think Judge is cheating. I think people want this to be a good story. They're not going to ask questions like we did in the 90s. In the 90s, Bons' head was growing. There were red flags.

or any red flags with Judge other than he's been unusually healthy this year. But I just think watching this judge thing, I think brought us back to when we love baseball where it was like,

this is cool. Did Judge do it tonight? Oh, oh, he's coming up. I'll flip over. When was the last time that happened in baseball? Other than the playoffs? I totally agree.

I want to go back to the 1990s because keeping with the theme of baseball ruining itself, I do think that a part of this story of Bonds v. judge involves baseball making enormous catastrophic mistakes in the 90s.

Like, I think the way the Major League Baseball-The people running baseball. Yes, absolutely. The administration, right, Bud Seelig, et cetera. And the way that the administrators treated steroid use in the 1990s was just about as stupid and incompetent as it gets. You mentioned the sort of the driving rule, where, you know, speeding is illegal, but maybe no police are enforcing it. That is basically what happened.

In the 1990s, Bud Seelik issued a few memos that stated that steroids were illegal. in baseball, but those memos were basically an FYI. There were no testing policies. There were no stated punishments. So, like, baseball cared, like, so much about keeping the sport clean that they had a rule in the books with no surveillance mechanism or enforcement. Like, it was a recipe for exactly the disaster that happened. Like, if you said to your kids, here's my credit card number, you're not allowed to use it, but I won't check if you use my credit card. And there isn't necessarily any punishment if you do. Like, do you think your kids are going to use your credit card?

Not necessarily. There was no punishment. There was no rules in place. There was no stated punishment. That's right. Yeah, there was no stated punishment. There was sort of an implication of possible punishment because there were federal laws in the books against steroids, but nothing explicit.

I mean, this was absurd, you would agree, as a matter of tacitly encouraging steroid use and then only later, you know, 15 years later, coming down on all these, the most successful players of the era and saying, oh, by the way, all this. this stuff that we kind of tacitly, you know, wink, wink, discouraged, now you're all blackballed from the sport. I would say tacitly, would you say tacitly discouraged might not make any sense. I mean there was this sort of like wink-wink relationship. I would say they tacitly embraced it, honestly. You got to go back to the 94th the strike, baseball dies, we're all the maddest we've ever been. There's no internet to kind of put that anger out. We just kind of had each other

and anecdotal conversations and sports 24-7 sports radio and newspaper columnists. There were no real venues for us to completely torch these guys, which they should have been. Comes back the next year. They embraced the Ripkin streak. It's like, remember baseball's American pastime?

We still have stuff like this, guys. But it didn't really come back. The Yankees won in 96, so all the New York people came back. And then by 97, 98, that's when the numbers started going way up. in the home run chase, which there was a moment, which I know you remember, when somebody noticed the creatine, a reporter noticed the creatine in McGuire's locker. And it became a huge story,

not because McGuire had creatine in his locker. And the reporter's like, what's this? And McGuire was super shady about it. The reporter was the one who got shit on and dragged for weeks that this guy betrayed the trust of the clubhouse. Why are you asking questions? It was like, we're all enjoying this. Fuck this guy. Why are you bringing this up? I'm having a great time with my home run chase. McGuire just hit 62 and picked up his son at home plate.

Picked him up in the air as his teammates mobbed him. You're fucking with this? Mike Lupco wrote a whole book about this whole era, about the summer of 98. Everything was romanicized. Everything. Did we think the guys were cheating? They were definitely way bigger.

I went to the 99 All-Star game in Fenway and it was like watching golf balls shoot over the fucking feds. Like they souped up the balls anyway, but they were going on on the mass pike. I was in the bleachers. It was the most amazing thing I've ever seen. Did I think the guys were cheating?

Yeah. Did I care? No. But it wasn't until Bonds threatened Babe Ruth and nobody liked Bonds. Bonds was a miserable guy. He was miserable to reporters. His teammates didn't really like him. Wasn't that much fun to hang out with if you're watching them on TV.

And when he started to approach that record, that's when it flipped. And that was when the, what are we doing started? There was, I thought, a racial component to it at the time. And even now, where the way that Bonds and his performance and his record, Bonds was going against people who were cheating. It's not like Bonds was just running amok as this lion in the wilderness against these weaker victims that didn't have, they,

how many people do you think were cheating, pitchers and hitters? Probably way more than we even knew about. Just this famous YouTube clip of a Bonds Gagne at bat, Eric Gagne, Gagne, sorry. The closer for the Dodgers. where they go and Bonds hits his foul ball like a million feet. And then he actually hits a homer on a pitch that Gagne threw like 102. And it's just like it was like steroid Batman versus Superman kind of whatever.

Gagne blows his arm out right after basically. People loved it. But the Bonds thing I think flipped it. Yeah. I think it's important because I want to talk a little bit about how we should think about bonds in history and how that should affect the way we describe Aaron Judge's accomplishment. I think it's useful to just do a quick review of the Barry Bond story. I'm going to try to do this in like two minutes, but then I want your reaction to this.

And I hope I get the details right. And if I get something wrong, jump right in. So, 98, as you described, magical summer, my favorite summer of watching baseball, McGuire and Sosa break the Roger Maris record. Both of them almost certainly reduced. McGuire later admitted he took HGH and steroids for years. Sosa denied taking steroids, but testes. positive in 2003.

At this point... Well, he was growing a second jaw, so we were getting suspicious. Right, exactly. Yeah, there were like, cow parts coming out of his own. Yeah, it's like, what's going on? There's their bones

that I didn't know somebody could have in their face that are happening right now. What's happening? So at this point, Barry Bonds is looking at Sammy Sosa's second jaw and McGuire's, you know, 14th bicep, and he's thinking, okay, if these guys can do it,

certainly can I. At this point, he's never hit more than 46 home runs in a year. But according to the book, Game of Shadows, which played a huge role and breaking open the practice of this era. This is around the time he starts taking steroids

through his trainer, Greg Anderson. There are a ton of substances mentioned in later investigations, including very famously the cream and the clear, which are illegal under federal law, but not, well, I guess, not explicitly banned by baseball, which has this sort of wink-wink, steroids are illegal, but we're never going to test them kind of rule at the time. No random testing.

Between 2001 and 2004, between the ages of 36 and 39, Barry Bonds has his four highest slugging seasons of his career. He wins MVP every year by at least one metric, OPS Plus, which is a kind of wonky way of doing on-base percentage plus slugging, adjusted for league average. These are the four best seasons in Major League history since the 1920s, in a row, one, two, three, four, all Barry Bonds. And they seemed to even crazier as they were happening.

He was getting on base like 50% of the time. It was shit that had just never happened before. So just a brief aside on these four years, Barry Bonds breaks the home run record in 2001. In 2002, he has his best season in ever relative to league average, the single best season of OPS Plus. Two years after that, 2004, pitchers are like, you know what? Fuck this. I'm not pitching to Barry Bonds. His on-base percentage clears 600, which itself ought to be illegal.

He sets the on-base percentage record, and he shatters the intentional walk record. Like, Barry Bonds is fucking amazing. He was getting walked with the bases loaded. Yes, exactly. The thing I've always wanted to know is like the HGH actually gave him like superpowers. He had, and what we always hear with HGH is it improves your eyesight. So if you have great eyesight anyway, you basically become like you can freaking see a feather from 10,000 miles away. Like you've just like you're like a superhero, which is what he was.

You could not throw a ball to him. He just wasn't going to swing at it. I'm about to say some not nice things about Barry Bonds, but let me pause before I say there's not nice things to say. that like bonds with these steroids was like Thor with the hammer. The same way like no one could do, no one can do with Thor's hammer, what Thor could do with this hammer.

It turns him into a super kind of superhero. Like these steroids plus Barry Bonds did four bonds that which no other player could like soak out of these steroids. Like it really is absolutely remarkable what he was able to do in these four years, which of course built on pre-existing talent. He was already the second coming of Willie Mays.

So back to the story. It's 2003. We're in the middle of, Bond's just incredible four years. They lost the World Series in 2002. He came very close, didn't win, but that was going to be the culmination of all this, but they lost. Yeah.

His trainer, Anderson, is indicted by a federal grand jury and charged with illegally distributing steroids. This starts looking awfully suspicious, because Justice Sammy Sosa now has his jaws and Rick McGuire's got his ridiculous arms. Bond's body has completely changed. Everyone knows that his head size has changed. He's gone from being, you know, the next really maze to being some hulking reincarnation of Babe Ruth.

This leads to speculation that Bonds has used performance-enhancing drugs while, again, there was no mandatory testing in Major League Baseball. Bonds, at the time, declares his innocence. The feds interview him. Bonds denies initially using performance-enhancing drugs. They conclude that he's lying to them. He's indicted for perjury and obstruction of justice, convicted by a federal court, and that conviction is overruled by the Ninth Circuit Court.

So I'd love just to know before we move on to how we should talk about this era, what your reaction is to that history, whether there's like little parts of that history that you didn't remember or things that you want us to, you know, carry as we move forward to talk about him versus judge. So you could go backwards into like the late 70s, which is when I really think steroid started in a whole bunch of different sports, especially football and some baseball too. And the home run stats get weird. And back then like the code word was Nautilus. So it always like, oh, he started a big Nautilus program over the winter. My thing is, I don't know when all this stuff started, but I know when we noticed was Brady Anderson in 1996.

When he went from 18 homers to 50, he used to be in the Red Sox. We traded him in the, I think it was the Mike Botiker trade. But he was like a, he was just like a speed outfield guy. I think his probably highest home run total, maybe it was like 16, 18, that definitely not higher than 20. Then he had 50 and he was jacked. He looked like, you know, like somebody that was like coming out of gold's gym in a tank top. And that was when all of us were like, hmm.

Now, the late 80s A's were another team. Konseco and McGuire, ironically. But Thomas Boswell wrote the thing about Konseco, we know he's on steroids or whatever he said, and everybody went nuts. What do you? How can you?

But then Konseko comes out later. Oh, yeah, I was definitely on steroids. The point is, I think you could argue steroids was around since the mid-70s in the Olympics and football, this different thing. We weren't aware of it until probably mid-late 90s as fans. And then it became one of the,

of those, do I like the guy or not situations? Like, I'll give you an example. Let's say a famous NFL quarterback, somebody mailed HGH to his house, and the famous NFL quarterback got caught because the things were there, but then they said it was actually for my wife. Pretty sure you're talking about my favorite quarterback. This happened to Peyton Manny. You can look it up. I know. H.G. H.G. H. H.G. mailed to his house during a time when he was trying to rebuild tape from a neck thing, and it was like, no, that was for my wife. And guess, guess. what we did. And by the way, I like Peyton Manning too. It was like, nah, we all like Peyton Manning. Fuck it. It was probably for his wife, but we moved on. With Bonds,

it was like, no, this guy, we, let's get him. And that was the mentality. People did not like Bonds. I look at Bonds. He was the best outfit I've ever seen in person. I've seen, I think every, I haven't seen some of the guys in the 25 and under guys, but the guys from like the mid-70s on, I've seen everybody in person. And Bonds and Ricky Henderson were the ones, like those would be the first two I would start talking about if you were like sitting at a bar with me. Like, tell me stories about great baseball players. He saw in person. I'd mention those two first.

He was an incredible defensive outfielder. I've never seen in person somebody play left field like that. It was really weird. Just the way he used the geography of left field and how close he would play and he always knew where he was. He had the best arm. He's fast. And then to watch him transform into the greatest power hitter slash on base guy ever, you know, that was weirdly memorable.

The whole era was memorable. And I think that's why people love the judge thing. We like to think of athletes as superheroes. I think it swung so far the other way. And I felt that. I sent you the ESPN magazine piece I wrote. I think it was like January 2007 because it was about whether McGuire

would be eligible for the Hall of Fame. And my thing was like, he should get in the Hall of Fame. His stats, put him in, put it on his plaque. Instead of us getting all precious about who belongs, who doesn't belong. And then you go, what do we do with Ty Cobb? The worst guy of like the first 30 years of baseball

and who allegedly fixed a game and was a racist and all these things. So I could feel it in the early 2007. We're getting a dangerous game here if we're going to decide we're the moral arbiters of justice. And I think that's where we've landed. You go to the Hall of Fame now.

Clemens isn't in there. McGuire's not in there. Sosa's not in there. All the great guys from, I'm in error. Most of them aren't going to be in there. So what's the point of the Hall of Fame? It's a fucking museum. It's not the Poet's or Prize. I want to distinguish between the Hall of Fame and the single-season home run record.

Because the Hall of Fame, I think Bonds obviously deserves to be in the Hall of Fame. McGuire obviously deserves. Roger Clemens, these people obviously deserve to be in the Hall of Fame. I mean, Bud Seelig, the guy who is arguably responsible for this mess is in the Hall of Fame. He got 93.7% to the vote. He's in the Hall of Fame. He oversawed all this damage. He was like the worst.

If he was the president, we would say he was the worst president of all time. Yes, people who closed their eyes, did nothing, let this happen, wink, wink, maybe tacitly encouraged it to happen, suddenly woke up and then presided over the reputational destruction of their sport, cast out the best players in baseball, just sent them to outer space, totally ethered them, ruined certainly, I'll speak personally, my interest in the game because I don't like watching cultural products where the best people are the ones who are most punished. He's in the Hall of Fame. I think these people, look, the Hall of Fame is the Museum of Baseball. Barry Bonds is arguably the most talented player in the history of baseball.

But you made the key point. It's a museum. Yeah. It's a museum. It's supposed to be a place you take your family, your kids, whatever, and you learn about baseball. How do you learn about baseball and not learn about Barry Bonds? It's fucking stupid. But imagine if we opened a steroids arrow wing, it'd be better than the status quo. It would acknowledge that. that Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens exist. But where do you draw the line? Like, do the other bad people go there? Like, is it the bad person side?

What is it? So this is, this is where I think the steroids era truly was a thing that you can draw a circle around it and pluck it out of history. Here's a statistic. Before 2022, there are six occasions to date when a player hit more than 61 home runs. Or you can say six times

when a player hit more than 62. home runs because judge has 62. Bonds in 2001, McGuire in 98, Sosa 98, McGuire 99, Sosa 2001, Sosa 99. That's four years. Baseball is 120, 130-something years old. Six times that home runs per year happened over 62, all happened in this four-year period marred with behavior that was technically illicit. And we know that it was illicit. And we know that these players took... Alicited or illegal? Well, the legality of it is like my, is, I know that these drugs, I did like a little bit,

I did research on this. The drugs aren't legally approved by the FDA. They are illegal. Their distribution, I believe, is illegal. They're not approved by the FDA. And that's why the federal government was coming in to punish people for their distribution. The degree to which their use is on a per case basis illegal is something that I don't necessarily think I can comment on.

I didn't talk to like a doping lawyer. But like, these guys at Balco, the, you know, Bonds trainer, these guys were punished by the federal government and investigated by the federal government. Something about or lots about the distribution of these drugs was illegal. Well, let me ask you this. If you, I don't know, you have your competitors in your field. You don't have to list them. They can all fuck off. But let's say some drug came out and it was like a combination of Adderall, but it also, like,

like just stimulated the writing side of your brain. And all of a sudden, four or five of your competitors were just writing some of the best shit we've seen in the last 50 years. And you're sitting there, Derek Thompson, you're like, hmm, is this a drug illegal? No, not technically. Are there ramifications on my body? Yeah, actually, there might be a little bit. Like you might, you know, your balls might shrink a little bit.

You might have some heart problems later. But short term, probably not a lot of damage. and then it becomes the case that would you do it? Most people wouldn't do it, but when you put competitive people with real money at line where it's like,

if I do this, not only do I succeed at my job, but I'll make way more money, it's hard for me to see how some people wouldn't say, all right, I'll do it for a couple years, which is what happened. I absolutely believe

that his behavior and the behavior of McGuire and Sosa was understandable from a human psychology, perspective. It was understandable. It might have even been at the margin reasonable. It like, a wise person might have said, look, not knowing the future, but Sealy doesn't care about steroids. Look, look over at the commissioner's office. You think they care about steroids? Their memos don't mention anything about surveillance. They mention nothing about punishment.

It's as mealy-mouthed and milk toast as you can poshly get. The league doesn't care. All they want is ratings. They want fans and butts and seats. They won't care. They won't care. I'm just doing what the rest of my competitors are doing, even if it's illegal. It nonetheless creates an era with a bubble of home run accomplishments that is unique in the history of baseball. And a part, I think, of being a baseball historian or just a person who talks about the sport is recognizing that this era was unique. The only six times that anyone hit over 62 home runs just happened to be in those four years. And so when we talk about baseball history. And when we talk about records, I think it's fine if one way that we talk about

that record, the record of single season home runs, is to acknowledge this historical aberration, created, by the way, by this brief introduction of drugs that violated federal law. So we can say, and I think we should say, who is the person who hit more home runs to anyone else in baseball history? The answer is simple. There's no dispute. It's 73, Barry Bonds, 2001, period. That's the answer to the trivia question. But this is the English language. These are records. We can just make them up.

We can make up new categories. And if I think reasonable people can say, here's a new category that recognizes the existence and historical uniqueness of the steroids era, it's called, I don't know, the clean single-season home run record. But we don't know if it's clean. What if Judge fails a test like next week?

If he fails a test next week, then he doesn't keep it. But for now, he hasn't failed any test. But what if somebody didn't fail a test who wasn't clean? I just, that's the point. And how do we know how long the steroids era was? As I mentioned before. Like, I think people think it was just late 90s, early 2000s.

I don't think it was. I think it was way longer than that. And I just think, for whatever reason, everything crested in this short window. But like, you know, Mike Stanton hit 59 homers a couple years ago. Or Gene Carlos Stanton, I guess. I still call Mike because I remember when I got his base. baseball card when he was like. Yeah, I don't know.

I mean, so much of this, I've talked about this before, but the NBA, and I don't know if they've changed this rule in the last couple years, but this was definitely a rule that they had for a long time. And I know for a fact, and I know all of the, I've heard it from different people. Four drug tests a year during the season. That was in the CBA. And there was a running thing in the league where after the fourth test, it was like, oh, I did my fourth test.

tonight's going to be a big night. Tonight's tonight. I'll smoke pot. I'll do whatever. But I know, you know, I'm going out until 4 in the morning. The other thing is they weren't testing during the playoffs. So if you're a really good basketball player and like, let's say HGH, which is the best recovery drug by all accounts,

it allows you, especially if you're playing, you know, four games in seven days or whatever. And playoff games, much harder, as you know, I just. find it impossible to believe that no great basketball star over the last like 25 years didn't use HGH and other stuff during the playoffs when they weren't testing. So should we put that air under suspicion? I don't know. That's why I think this is, this gets really dangerous. I think we're in a good spot with this.

People bring up that bonds record. There's a comma. And then they, and then how you handle that couple words after the comma is how you feel about it. And for us, it's like, bonds at 73. that's the most anyone's hit, definitely cheated. And that's it. And I think that's inherent. I don't think we need to do anything crazy other than that.

Nobody knows bonds hit 73, or I should say, nobody thinks bonds hit 73 and did it naturally with no help. So that's what it is. I think, you said two things I definitely agree with. Number one, I think you and I, and I think just about every reasonable person agrees that 73 is the record. 73 is the record that is in the record books.

It's on baseball reference and then the baseball almanac. This isn't like a Lance Armstrong situation where his tour de France wins were literally taken away and are expunged from the record. Like the record book, say 73, that's it. What you've also acknowledged, though, is that it's perfectly fine to want to explain the difference between Bond's accomplishment

and judge's accomplishment as far as we know. In fact, most people do contextualize it. it. Whether they say it's the clean record, it's the legitimate record, I don't like legitimate record. That gets a little bit too close. Or it's the record, period. Also, bonds, we know, took the cream and the clear and a bunch of other stuff and was associated with Balco. I just feel like there's a lot of anger and a lot of fun anger, I should say. Again, it's fun that we're debating this. There's a lot of passion about how exactly we contextualize this record when we all fundamentally agree that Aaron Judge has hit more home.

home runs than any person whom we don't have pretty clear information having been on steroids. Like, that is an accomplishment that we can give a category to. Well, I think we did. With Judge, we did. We made up this American League record thing that. I love that. Can't remember another American League record. What are the other American League records?

Who is the American League record for strikeouts? Stolen bases. I have no fucking clue. Stolen bases in a season. I don't know. Probably would have been, was really. Ricky Henderson with the... Probably Ricky.

Sure. Sounds great. You had to go through them all. Or the other one I loved was the Yankee team record because really people cared with the judge saying that he passed Ruth and Garrig and Maris. And that was symbolic in a lot of ways. Maris' thing lasted 60 years. Yeah, I think one of the things that I think is really important with this

that ties into even the discussion where I'm having now, none of these guys that either got caught or were suspected of doing something ever just said, yeah, I did it. There were no rules. All of them, because when you said Lance Armstrong, this made me think of this. Lance Armstrong wasn't just that he cheated.

He was the biggest fucking asshole on the planet about it. He berated reporters, he threatened to sue them. And, you know, like when ESPN did that 30 for 30 about him, which I thought was really well done. And not that many people watched it, because people, they don't like Lance Armstrong. They don't want to forgive Lance Armstrong.

He was a prick for too long. And I think the common denominator with a lot of the baseball guys were not only did they do whatever they did, but they were adamant. They weren't doing it. And they were defensive and angry about it to the bitter end. And then when push came to shove and they had to admit, either they did what McGuire did and I'm not here to talk about the past.

And they were just cowards about it. And I think that really colored how we felt about that era. It's bad enough to cheat. It's another thing to be a dick about cheating. I totally agree with all that. And I think that one of my concluding thoughts here is that on the one hand, I am, again, so happy to have a subject in baseball

that I can feel passionately about and that can move my blood pressure. On the other hand, it's just very clear to me, especially given everything that you said about the way that the baseball administration, the MLB administration, thought about and planned around steroids in 1990s. And the media.

Don't leave out the media with that. The media was terrible during this time. Say it a little bit more about that. Well, they just, nobody was asking questions. None of them. And as soon as the evidence, and then it was like, oh my God, I can't believe this happened. It's like, you guys were covering these guys every day.

Nobody had any questions? The guy found the creatine in McGuire's locker to hear. Like, oh, what a dick. Can't believe he portrayed it. Like, so I feel like they were at least a little complicit. Yeah. Well, I was just thinking that in a way, the fact that we have to fight amongst ourselves about this record does seem downstream of the fact

that people like Bud Seelig didn't do their business when they had to do their business. They allowed these problems to fester. They allowed this confusion to happen. They punish these people long after the records were set. Their actual legacy punishment isn't to have the record books change, but rather to have the museum of baseball, the official registrar of baseball history, keep these people from being included in baseball history, bizarrely. And that leaves it to us, to the sort of 2022 commentary to say, well, how do we talk about Bond's accomplishments?

Because in the one hand, you look at baseball reference, this is clearly the greatest hitter of the 21st century and maybe the greatest baseball player ever. On the other hand, these accomplishments are on the back of all sorts of drugs that were tacitly allowed, but also wink-wink ignored by Major League Baseball. And now we have to decide how we talk about the legitimacy of his accomplishments. It's like baseball didn't clean up its mess.

And now our vocabulary has to do the rest of the work. I'll say this. I've been a baseball fan my whole life and I still watch Red Sox games, although lately I haven't because they suck and it makes me mad. But the single most fun stretch of baseball in my lifetime, hands down was like late 90s through 2004. and you go back and you look at the beats from like the Yankees winning the World Series in 96 who Jeter as a rookie, that weird Florida Cleveland series in 97 where Cleveland comes so close and they blow it.

98, the home run chase, all of that that happened. 99. Kind of the peak of Pedro, the All-Star game at Fenway with Ted Williams. The Yankees now trying to put together a little mini-dynasty. Red Sox Yankees heats up that year in a real way. That was awesome. 2000 Yankees going for four. The records are going crazier and crazier.

Bonds in 2001. And you go all the way through to the Bartman and Aaron Boone in 2003, which is the greatest AOCS NLCS combo. Just holy shit we've had. And then 2004, the Red Sox win the World Series. Every year was some sort of new groundbreaking thing. And it was awesome. And we were out and we're all watching and all arguing about it.

And then that started a fade, I think, over the last 18 years. And what you said is, like, part of the reason this is such a great argument is everybody has a different opinion on it. And it's hard to say who's right. I don't know if I'm right. I don't know if you're right. And I'm sure there's people who would listen to pieces of things that we said. I can't believe he said that. That's insane.

Oh, my God. That's so wrong. But that's the thing. We don't get to do that with baseball anymore. You get to do it with the baseball playoffs. You'd be like, I think the Astros are going to beat the Yankees. What? The Yankees have so much power.

And we could argue about postseason matchups. And that's really all we have left. The Otani thing, Judge should be the MVP. There's going to be a whole nerd case for Otani that the combination thing he's doing. He's clearly the best and most important, most valuable player we have. This is crazy. Sorry, Judge. It's Otani.

Judge is the MVP. His team is the second best team in the American League. He carried them on his back. He'd won the great offensive seasons ever. And he's the MVP of the American League. But Otani might win. I don't think he'll win. I think Judge will win with the 62

and Otani having won last year might make people feel like, you know, Otani has his and Judge has his and they're the two most exciting players in the American League. What you said is so interesting, though, because I, you know, I'm 36 years old. I got into baseball in the middle of the 1990s.

I don't think you know this. You're not going to like hearing this. I got into baseball because my uncle lived to New York introduced me to baseball the 1995, 1995, 1996 season, and I fell in love with a rookie named Derek in 96,

and so I happen to be a Yankees fan. I heard you talking about. about it on the part. Okay. Yeah. And so I, yeah, I'm a, I'm a big Yankees fan. And that, that stretch from, right, 96 to 2004 is just so special for me. And I feel like there's a whole generation or microgeneration of like millennials who there's their entire relationship with baseball is just wondering, why don't I like baseball as much as I did in 1998, like, or 1999, 2001. And like, that's the relationship. Like, why don't I care about Mike Trout? Why don't I watch more Aaron Judge games? And it's, It's just lovely to finally have a debate that we can throw our entire body into.

Well, you know, the last piece of that is I just think baseball became so localized. And that same stuff we have with baseball is now, like, I'm on a Red Sox text thread, and I have Red Sox friends my life. And we just really talk about the Red Sox. We would never be like, whoa, where does this Dodgers team rank for you? Like, man, in the all-time teams, who's the vet? Like, we just wouldn't. But in basketball, we would.

You'd be like, if, you know, if the warrior started out again, like 30 and 4, be like, wow, is this a dynasty now? And we'd have all these things. And baseball just doesn't work like that. It's really about your team. And then you kind of know what's going on, but you don't really have to care until October. And part of that is because the records have been pretty much rendered meaningless. And the stereo is a big part to blame, which is why people get so mad about it now.

Yeah, that's right. I hadn't really quite put those two things together because I was holding in my head at the same time. I've heard over and over and agree with the fact that baseball has become hyper-localized. But I think you're right that it's partly because the national discourse in baseball was about statistics.

People love to, I know when I was in middle school, I loved talking about baseball stats. Most RBIs, most runes, most still in baseball. Hack Wilson, 190. I was like, oh my God. Hunter-90. Who knew? Hack Wilson.

That's what was fun. And that was the national discourse. And once the statistics had the stink of steroid on them, then it killed the national conversation. And it meant that if you're going to be into the sport, you're going to be into it because you're in the zip code where the sport is relevant, not because you have purchased into this national conversation. So I agree. I think that in a weird way, that this conversation is a reflection of what drove the 20-year decline of national baseball discourse. But explain this. Ray Lewis had the deer antler spray thing in the 2012 playoffs.

Remember he got caught and it's pretty clear that he was doing something. And whatever, it became a huge story. I remember making a ton of jokes about it in my column and on my podcast. Went away. Nobody cares. Ray Lewis is on TV. Did Ray Lewis cheat? It kind of seemed like he cheated.

People didn't care. So that's the piece with Bonds and some of these other guys. It's like this weird disappointment in the people versus like the expectation of like, oh, of course he did that. He has to play football. You got to be big when you play football. In baseball, they were being held to this weird moral standard that I never, same thing for Clemens. You know, I don't understand why it was baseball only, but it was.

And I think it's something new with the America's pastime. And you watch the movie, eight men out and like the 1919 black socks. and like don't taint baseball, don't besmirch baseball. Baseball is our one thing. You can't ruin it. And then it got ruined, and I think it made people mad. Yeah, to me, it's a couple things. Number one, it's that people don't really care about, like, total tackles.

Like the record for total tackles or, like, tackles in the game. So Ray Lewis's contribution was wrapped up in his team's success. So there was no individual record that was besmirched by the fact that he sprayed whatever the hand thing was on his shoulder. They did win the Super Bowl, though. They did win the Super Bowl, but it was a team victory, and so no individual record was disparaged. I also think that it's just my experience of baseball in the middle of the 2000s, like 2005, six, seven was, holy shit, all those accomplishments are fake.

Yeah, what do I do now? That was a message that wasn't just driven by baseball itself. It was driven by baseball coverage. It was driven by ESPN. It was driven by the federal government that hauled Sosa and Raphael Palmero and all those guys up in front of the Congress and said, you know, did you use this stuff? And then they had to say, give their embarrassing non-answers. So the television representation of baseball for a while was your heroes are fakes. Like what would be the equivalent be for the NFL? I can't like if,

if it turned out that like, you know, Brady and Mahomes and, you know, Josh out, like my favorite quarterbacks, it turned out like they all were using some drug I haven't heard of, right? And like for years, for years, they were not only blackballed by their sport, like bonds didn't. get a contract when he was 41, 42, when he was still very, very good at baseball. They weren't just blackballed by the sport. They were hauled up in front of Congress and they had to wear awkward fitting suits and then got screamed at by the representative from Iowa. Like, that's what the experience of baseball became for me.

And that sucked. It just sucked to have that rug torn out from under my feet. And, well, let me ask you this. If the NBA, if one of the biggest stars in the league, failed an HGH or a steroids test. If you're Adam Silver, do you throw them the trash can? Oh, boy. I think, not only because it's the first thing that came to mind,

but also because I think I want to be ethically consistent, if you're going to enforce this stuff, you have to enforce it. The reason baseball got into trouble is because it had a rule in the books that was in keeping with federal law, that it refused to enforce and refuse to surveil. Yeah. And therefore, it tacitly encouraged, I'm sorry to keep using this phrase over and over again, but therefore it basically gave the green light to all these players to cheat in a way that

they could be punished or investigated by the feds for years and years. So if you're Adam and you don't, if you're Adam Silver and you don't have, and you don't enforce that law, then I would be worried that you create the exact same scenario where you say, okay, player X, you can do this, player Y, you can do this. Five years later, 70% of the league is on an illegal substance, and you've got the federal government opening up a new Mitch report that's throwing to show you that all these people you love in basketball are actually totally, total cheeses and fakes. So you would crack down right away, yeah.

Because it's a fun, not fun, but it's a juicy discussion because you could also argue, he's like, ooh, let's get rid of this. This would be bad for the sport. it's such an individual brand-driven league that just to bring that element in and opening that door, I don't know. But you have to know. He would be at least smart. The punishing side I'm more uncertain about,

but what I'm sort of convincing myself of is the importance of the surveillance side. If you've got a lot of stars who are cheating, you have to figure out before Washington does. Yeah, good point. If Washington figures out before you get a hold in the situation, your sport becomes C-SPAN. That is the danger.

It's no longer the ESPN sport is the C-SPAN sport. In a weird way, that sort of like pendulum swing between ESPN and C-SPAN is a part of what I think killed baseball for me. And that's why I'm glad you brought up the C-LIC point earlier because it's crazy that he's in the Hall Fame. He shouldn't be. It's crazy that he doesn't get blamed for any of this stuff.

You know, if you're the teacher in the fifth grade class and the kids are shooting bow and arrows at each other, Do you get blamed? Yeah. There's no accountability with that guy and there's no accountability with the owners. All that cared about was the interest and the ratings and people are coming to the ballpark

and every year there was some sort of story that lasted six months. And they basically sold their souls for it in some ways. But I don't even, I really don't think anyone expected how negative it would get in that 01 to 07 range. and how people would react

and I don't know maybe there's some way to tie in just how America has changed and evolved over the last 50, 60 years but I just think in a different era I just don't think people would have gotten this upset about it. Kind of in the 21st century

we reached the people just getting upset era, people looking for reasons to fly off the handle and being disappointed and I do feel like that was a small piece of it. I remember being upset when it was like, I didn't want bonds to get 70. I didn't want him to pass, you know, any of those guys because it was clear as cheating, but I also didn't like him.

And so that's where it ties into that. When you don't like the guy, you become even more judgmental. Yeah, I think in modern sports, I don't want to come off as being too persnickety about, you know, drug use generally. I actually am relatively laissez-faire libertarian on the general issue. But just from a strategic standpoint, I think that the lesson of the 90s for baseball, for other leagues, is if your players are violating a federal law and you don't do anything to clean it up, you're creating a scenario by which the feds are going to have to clean it up, and they're going to make you look ridiculous. And they're going to make that entire era's achievements look besmirched in a way that's going to make fans of your sport just feel a little bit like toe-curlingly icky about all the fun that they had. And that's not what you want to feel when you watch sports.

You want to lose yourself in the accomplishment and think that the people who are doing things you could never do are semi-magical. You don't want to think that this isn't magic. It's actually downstream of a chemical that was applied to a bicep illegally. Sterey right there, it never happens. 95-0-4.

It just never happens. It's basically like the 80s. What do we look like now with baseball? Is it any different? Do you think baseball lost? fans, because I would say the one thing that would look different is the context of the records, I think we would care about way more. And also, those guys wouldn't have broken, maybe one of them would have come close. Might have been McGuire, I don't know. My guess would be none of them would

have come close. Maybe they would be in the 50s close to 60s, 61. But if none of them passed, then a moment, like the judge thing becomes so much bigger. It's like, oh my God, this guy might It's 62 home runs. Nobody's done that before. So I do think if the stuff doesn't happen, I do think people care about baseball more because we would still care about the records more, which we don't.

I think two things happened, or at least two things happened. I think baseball got boring. I think that data dulling and the dark side of money ball and I don't think it's all the shift. That's happening anyway. I don't think it's all seven pitchers throwing 100 miles an hour,

launch angle, three true outcomes. All of that, I think, has very little to do with the steroids era. and it all might have been coming anyway. That's on its own track. But what we would still have, I think, is the circa 1993, 1993, 1994 sense that these records are precious

and it's fun as hell to talk about them because they mean something. And even though it's not necessarily appropriate to compare statistics across era, who cares? It's fun as compare statistics across era. These are numbers, and it's fun to have debates with number games. That was just a part of what I loved about baseball

in the Little League dugout in McLean, Virginia, is talking about Hank Aaron versus Willie Mays and Juan Gonzalez versus who, you know, Ken, Caminetti. Oh, I'm gone. I forgot about him. I just loved having these debates. And I feel like there's just something that killed it. Growing up Bob Gibson's record, the RA record. Mm-hmm.

That was another one where there was a comma, and they knew that to say, you know, that was the low mound era, whatever they, whatever they called it back then. But it was still the record. And it was still, and we knew nobody was going to approach it. We knew nobody was going to approach Sy Young 500 of the wins, because that was back in the day where you like pitched every day. And that just factored that era. So I think that eventually the steroids era will be like that where we think like, well, that happened because of this. And there would be some sort of conclusion to it. Ricky Henderson, I think he has, was he the most with stolen bases? 130?

Yeah, by far. Yeah. But that was an era where people stole bases like crazy. And it was before the nerds came in and were like, wait a second, if you're only, if you're batting like 50% on steals, that's actually terrible for your offense. You're costing yourself this many runs. People were like, whoa, we are. And that stopped. But there was this era where it was like so-and-so had 40 stolen bases and got caught 22 times.

And that was like great. Now not great. So I think every era has its own thing that you just have to have the caveat on. Don't you think every era wants to believe, and this is kind of true across cultural industries, whether it's sports or entertainment,

if there's a possibility they might be living in the golden age. Like, people enjoy thinking, I might be watching, if I'm watching a weekend of football with Pat Mahomes, Tom Brady, Josh Allen, Aaron Rogers, I might be watching the greatest quarterback

of all time. He might be on my television. And in basketball, people enjoy feeling like, wait, could LeBron do it? Could Janus do it? Is Winbaugh, the greatest basketball player in the history of the game?

Yes. People enjoy the possibly, the answer is in fact, yes. The answer is yes. He's the first alien we've had who's going to succeed. People enjoy thinking, this might be it.

I might be present at the golden age. Oh, yeah. I've been writing about this forever. It is the, you want to brag about that you were there for this great thing. Yep. You know, and you could really feel with LeBron and when he won in 2016.

That's it. He's the greatest. Here it is. And it's like, well, Jordan did win six. And we saw it last year with Curry. It's like, that's it. Greatest shooter ever going to happen again. We'll never see this. They love to do that. I did it with Pedro in the late 90s. And by the way, I stayed by it. Yeah, that was the best pitching season ever. Yeah, I was like, this will never be topped. He went into Yankee Stadium.

The best baseball team of the last, I don't know, 50 years. They were going to win the title. they already went in and threw one hitter in September, struck out 17. It was the best team we had that whole decade. And he just went in like freaking Clint Eastwood. So yeah, I feel good about that one. And I guess I just do, you know,

to bring it back to baseball and sorry to, you know, keep being millennial sad boy about this sport. But like, I do just feel like I'm not in the golden era. This isn't it. I don't know what this is, but it's not the golden era. Mike Trout is incredible. He's not the best. He has like three at bat's total in the playoffs.

Like he can't be the goat. Shohayotani, incredible. He plays for a team that's what, you know, fourth in its division. Like he can't be, he's not a meaningfully great player. That's baseball's fault, though. They have to get him off the Angels. If I were emperor of baseball, I would break up Angels. That's a business decision out.

Get this guy off the Angels and put him in New York. Like just, it's done. It's a wrap. We have to do this. make it out, put him on the Red Sox, and he has to be on one of the five big market teams. It's not the Angels. You're wasting,

it's not like Janus can go to Milwaukee and become one of the biggest stars in the world because it doesn't matter in the NBA. It matters in baseball. No, it's like a Powell-Gissol situation. Like, we got to get this guy out of Memphis. He's going to Los Angeles. Get him out.

You have to. I think that to a certain extent, that's a really important thing for a cultural industry or for cultural product to have is the promise that it's in the golden age. And I would say basketball is the one that probably is grasping on that right now because they have the most good players they've had in my lifetime.

The league's like fucking loaded. You've all these under 25 stars. You still have the LeBron generation still kicking around. And then you have the guys in their absolute prime now like Janus and Yokage, things like that. And the league is loaded. So when people make that case, it actually might be true that we have the most basketball stars right now than we've ever had. I agree with that.

I think we do. And it's one of the reasons why, in a very weird way, not a weird way at all. I think basketball has totally replaced baseball for me as the sport in which even when I don't pay attention to the local teams, I'm so invested in the national narrative because it's so suffused with greatness that I feel like I'm in the golden age. I want to know more about it on a day-to-day basis, the storylines, the drama. I'm in it and I want to stay in it. This would be a good part too that we should do on my podcast. We try to figure out the golden age for each sport. The golden age for each sport. You know, we can expand it. And how long has it? And how long

as a golden age, is it four years, six years? Because for baseball it's probably 98 to 04, I would say it was like the golden age for baseball. Yeah. You could say it was maybe 96-04, but probably 98-0-4.

So that's seven seasons. So maybe it's like a seven-seasoned. I would have said initially for the NBA it would have been 84 to 91, which was just awesome. And you could even stretch it 84 to 93. but bird of magic right into MJ

just out of control. So good. But I think they have a chance to match that now, but it would be fun to go through each sport. That could be a good sequel. It could be. And actually,

you know, also maybe I've been interested to do that sort of across entertainment and culture, you know? Like, you know, bring on Sean. What's the, oh, like a series?

Well, what's the golden age of movies? There's lots of debate about the golden age of television. Well, Sean would say the 70s. Sean would say mid-70s. Yep. Yeah. Godfather to Pacino's.

Yeah, and you also have Jaws and you have Star Wars and the innovation from probably 72 to 79 or 72 to 80, whatever. He'll know all the dates, because it's about innovation, right? In basketball, the innovation was the three-point shot. So that's another one. We have to take the records and everything from 2013 on. It becomes a different sport, really by the end of that decade. And now the sport that they're playing, you can't compare. So when Draymond says the 86 Celtics would never be able to play against us or whatever team,

I'm not sure he's right or wrong, but I know the Warriors are playing a different sport. It doesn't factor in the part that the 86 Celtics would have adjusted to the better way to play the sport, which is right now because three points are worth more than two. So they would move the guards back. They've shot more threes. And it's a whole thing. But that's why this basketball thing is so much fun because we've reinvented and made the sport more fun without compromising it. I love it. I love the idea of Golden Ages. I think it's just fun. You can absolutely count me in.

Good series. That could be, yeah, that's a good, maybe that's a good spin-off miniseries or something. We'll talk offline. We'll talk offline. Bill Simmons, thank you very, very much. Pleasure as always. Thank you for listening. Plain English is produced by Devin Manzi. If you like the show, please go to Apple Podcast or Spotify. Give us a five-star rating. Leave a review. And don't forget to check out our TikTok at Plain English underscore. That's at plain English underscore on TikTok.