Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader is going to share some thoughts he’s having about baseball. (Hence the title of this post… This post is, in no way, connected to the very fine website of the same name.)
Insofar as your Maximum Leader is concerned, it has been a good weekend for the national pastime. The Nationals have swept both the Red and the Cardinals and are now (for the time being) over .500 at RFK. The Nats have been playing good ball. They have been making hits and generating runs the old fashioned way. They have not be relying on the long ball to give them all their scoring. Your Maximum Leader likes to see balls hit into play. This is not to say that he doesn’t like seeing home runs (he does), but he likes seeing men thinking about how to run the bases. Your Maximum Leader would like to see the Nats finish above the Marlins in the NL East. It could happen. He’ll keep his fingers crossed.
Speaking of the Nationals… You may have heard that they are on the road now. In San Francisco. For four games. This means two things… First, your Maximum Leader will not be able to watch or listen to the whole game. The games will end way past his bedtime. Secondly, it means that it is likely that Barry Bonds will hit his record-breaking 756th career home run against a Nationals pitcher (thereby making that pitcher a footnote to history).
Here is the prediction. Barry Bonds will hit home run 756 tonight off John Lannan in the first inning with one man aboard and two outs. Bonds will hit the fourth pitch served up to him out. The ball will be caught by a fan standing between the outfield and McCovey Cove.
You can’t get much more precise than that when it comes to predictions dear minions…
All in all, your Maximum Leader will be happy for Barry Bonds when he hits 756. While your Maximum Leader isn’t sure that the career home run record is the “most hallowed” of all sporting records — it is right up there near the top. (To be frank, your Maximum Leader is partial to Joe DiMaggio’s most consecutive games with a hit record.) Regardless of what Barry Bonds may, or may not, have done he is a great ball player and has worked hard to claim the record for himself. Your Maximum Leader will not rehash the whole “did he or didn’t he” use performance enhancing drugs debate here. If you care to know, your Maximum Leader believes that Bonds probably has used performance enhancing drugs during his later career. Your Maximum Leader also believes that people in our justice system are innocent until proven guilty. Your Maximum Leader further believes that major league baseball, as a business entity, doesn’t give a rats arse if players use performance enhancing drugs. Regardless about what we see and hear about nowadays with all these investigations, baseball would prefer the negative attention to go away and just let players keep on doing whatever they were doing before the spotlight came on. We all know chicks dig the long ball and everyone pays to see offense (not a pitching duel).
Your Maximum Leader would like to see a controlled study about performance enhancing drugs and how much performance they enhance. Barry Bonds was a 40/40 man before there was any thought that he might be “on the juice.” It takes skills and talent to be a good ball player. You could pump up your Maximum Leader with all the substances in the world, and you couldn’t make a ball player out of him. Your Maximum Leader is not wholly convinced that being on some banned substance will substantially improve performance across the board. Your Maximum Leader is sure that steroids or HGH will make one stronger, but he isn’t sure that it will improve hand-eye coordination or make it possible for someone to hit the ball better. Indeed, your Maximum Leader isn’t too sure if being stronger always helps you hit the ball further. Making quality contact is the best way to get a hit. Your Maximum Leader suspects, but wouldn’t mind seeing serious study on the subject, that performance enhancing drugs might only marginally increase one’s hitting numbers. He could, and quite possibly is, wrong on this. But that is his hunch. Frankly, your Maximum Leader thinks that if there is an incentive for players to take banned drugs it is to shorten recovery time and enable them to play through minor injuries…
Anyhoo…
Your Maximum Leader was pleased to see Alex Rodriguez hit his 500th homer. That is a good milestone. We can speculate all we want about how A-Rod might be the one to break Barry Bond’s homer record. Your Maximum Leader, a few years ago, would have told you that the home-run king of baseball by 2007 was going to be Ken Griffey Jr. So see where that idle speculation gets you.
Your Maximum Leader was most interested in Tom Glavine’s 300th victory. He watched the game intently. Normally, your Maximum Leader would be rooting for the Cubs to take the Mets down, but last night was an exception. Although your Maximum Leader hadn’t considered it until it happened, he is inclined to believe the many commentators who say that it could be decaded before we see another 300 game winner — if we see one at all. With more teams (practically all of them) counting pitches, having bigger bullpens, and more men in the starting rotations (your Maximum Leader believes that he will see 6 man starting rotations before he dies) it seems statistically unlikely that there will be another 300 game winner for a long time. Your Maximum Leader doesn’t see Randy Johnson getting into the 300 club. And Johnson would be the most likely candidate. Your Maximum Leader doffs his bejeweled floppy cap to Tom Glavine on a job well done…
Your Maximum Leader will be watching the Nats v. Giants tonight (in High Definition no doubt) for a while… We’ll see if his prediction comes true.
Carry on.
