Sports Frog

Very, very quietly - with far less fanfare than what a reformed drug addict on his team received for hitting his first - Ken Griffey, Jr. hit the 564th home run of his career. This pushed him past Reggie Jackson and onto the list of top 10 home run hitters of all time.

This is the tragedy of the steroid era in baseball. Here we have a player who, while not always the media darling we require, has basically been a model citizen. Yes, he has been plagued by injuries. Yes, he is playing in Cincinnati, where he is often ignored and overlooked. Yes, he is playing in a hitter's era with smaller ballparks.

But the real reason that this milestone has been largely ignored by the baseball press and the American public, is because the value of the home run has never been lower. And that is because of the shadow of steroids. We all heard the arguments about ballparks, the tighter balls, and expansion in 1998 when Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire were hitting home runs night after night. And yet we clearly did not care. It was the top news story, not the top sports story. Street vendors in New York City were hawking Big Mac and Sosa hats and t-shirts. That home run race is credited with bringing Americans back to baseball after the canceled 1994 World Series.

And when Griffey looks up on the top 10 list, four of the nine players in front of him have something very much in common:

#2 741 HR Barry Bonds
#5 592 HR Sammy Sosa
#7 583 HR Mark McGwire
#9 569 HR Rafael Palmeiro

So here we have a clean-cut, All-American, son of a ballplayer who has never been associated with steroids moving onto the top 10 list of all-time. And barely a peep is uttered. How quietly did this happen? The story that I linked, and most of the other top stories on Griffey's historic achievement, don't even warrant their own story. Most of them are included in daily recaps and round-ups of news around the baseball world.

Sad.