Mike Celizic

Now that Barry Bonds slugged his way past Hank Aaron on Tuesday night, the record needs no asterisk or explanatory — or even exculpatory — footnote. Like a captive soldier, it’s rank, name and number.

The conditions under which records are achieved change constantly. The records themselves are absolute. There is no other way to handle them other than to write down the raw number and let the analysts and history draw their own conclusions.

If it were otherwise, Cy Young would not stand at the top of the all-time wins list, the 511 victories after his name unsullied by a silly little star or a footnote to direct the reader’s attention to an explanation of how those wins were compiled.

If there were such a notation, it would tell anyone looking at the list that Young pitched in the dead-ball era, when pitchers threw every three or four days and sometimes pitched both ends of doubleheaders.

It would say they didn’t do that because they were made of sterner stuff than today’s pitchers, but because the nature of the game allowed them to throw at three-quarter speed most of the time, saving their arms for the few situations that mattered.

When home runs were as rare as ecumenical fundamentalists, and it took three hits to score one run instead of the other way around as it is today, pitching was a different occupation.

We know that — or we should. The record book doesn’t. We can pretend that the game is played today exactly as it was in 1950, but it’s not.

Conditions, equipment, ballparks, strike zones and ballplayers change constantly.

Go back to 1968 and Bob Gibson’s incredible 1.12 ERA. Why can’t anyone come close to that today? Was Gibson simply that much better than a Roger Clemens or Randy Johnson or Greg Maddux or even Bob Feller?

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Of course not, and if you look in the record book, you’d be shocked to see that even Gibby’s 1.12 looks profligate next to Tim Keefe’s all-time record of 0.857 set in 1880. If that doesn’t require a footnote, what does? And if Gibson’s entry had one, it would explain that the record was set in the Year of the Pitcher when the strike zone extended from armpit to the bottom of the knee and encompassed half a zip code, and the mound was 17 inches or more high — it’s 10 inches today. It might also observe that 1968 was the heyday of multi-purpose parks with deep dimensions and no hitter-friendly nooks and crannies. The average ERA for all of major league baseball that year was under 3.00. You’d need to know that, too.

But Gibson’s 1.12 stands proud and alone without explanation or apology.

This is as it should be, because if you start explaining the why of the numbers, you’d have to put an asterisk next to every number in there.

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Hack Wilson would have a footnote next to the record 191 RBIs he had in 1930, which is seven more than anyone else ever had. The little star would explain that in 1930, the ball was so juiced the NL batting average was .303.

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