Daily Jolt: Numbers Always Need Context

The Daily Jolt is a dose of baseball reality every weekday morning.

It's all too easy in the wake of Alex Rodriguez's admission that he used performance-enhancing drugs to throw up our hands and say the numbers mean nothing. If you listen to the echo chamber of hysterical pundits, this is the dawn of a new age of baseball nihilism.

There are many lessons to be learned and re-learned from the latest twist in the Rodriguez saga. One of the smaller takeaways: Statistics always require context for real meaning to be gleaned from them.

What would asterisks accomplish anyway? Even if you ignore the obvious fairness issues, it's a symbolic gesture that would do little to heal the people wounded by the rampant drug use of the era and would do nothing for the people who are not. The same goes for wiping the official record books clean.

Understanding the era -- the complexities and motivations of all the principle players in this sad tale -- that's difficult. But understanding the numbers? That's relatively simple for anyone with even a simple grasp on statistical analysis.

The story goes that Hank Aaron, the home run king, lost his title unfairly to Barry Bonds, and that someday soon Bonds will lose his title to another cheater, Alex Rodriguez. Rather than talking about silly proactive measures that would make only a few people feel better for a little while, why can't we just leave the numbers alone and evaluate them as part of baseball's timeline?

After all, what do we mean when we call Aaron the rightful home run king? We mean he hit the most career home runs of any player in baseball history, not including those who have been tainted by a link to steroids. Is Aaron the greatest home run hitter in baseball history? It all depends on how you choose to define greatest, of course, but many would give Babe Ruth that title. He didn't hit as many career home runs, but given the fact that he did things like out-homer entire teams in certain seasons, it's very easy to make the case that he was a more prodigious slugger.

Baseball is filled with statistical oddities, with numbers that don't match up, with feats that have to be explained and rationalized and contextualized next to other ones.

Bob Gibson's 1.12 ERA in 1968 is the lowest single-season mark in baseball history. That doesn't mean it was necessarily the greatest season by a pitcher, not when six other pitchers posted sub-2.00 ERAs and 42 more had sub-3.00 ERAs that year.

Milestones are not sacred. They are just numbers and nothing more. It is up to us as fans to decide what they actually mean. With the help of steroids and a number of other factors, offense was wildly inflated in the 1990s and early 2000s. Records were re-written, but our perceptions, thoughts and opinions about a game with more than 100 years of history don't have to be.