Aaron is still the home run king in my book.

Mets fan "joe" on the MetsToday blog wrote a great post back in April where he makes a great case for why he thinks Hank Aaron will always be the home run king, and i agree with his analysis completely. the main gist of his argument is that, through radical shifts in baseball rules which gave all the advantage to the hitter, in order to increase baseball's "saleability", Barry Bonds has been able to eclipse Aaron's record while playing in an era where the pitcher is essentially pitching batting practice.

a few of his reasons to back this up:

-in Aaron's day, the brushback pitch was widely used by pitchers to establish the inside corner. today, if the ump decides a pitcher is intentionally throwing at a hitter, the pitcher can be ejected.
-today, as well as not having to fear being challenged inside by pitchers, batters can pretty much wear as much protective armor as they can still function in. batters can bat today without fear.
-the pitching mound was lowered by 5 inches.
-the strike zone was shrunk.
-their are twice as many teams now as there were during the majority of Aaron's career, diluting the available pitching talent.

there's more--i suggest reading his post.

of course, i could just be clinging to something that meant a lot to me as a youngster growing up in Alabama in the late 60's-70's. my dad used to make sure that he and I made the trek to Atlanta at least a couple times a year to catch Braves' games. he'd figure out when there were saturday double-headers scheduled and we'd catch as many as we could...even though we were probably at the lowest of the low end of the "middle class". i figure between 1969 and 1975 i probably saw a couple dozen Braves games. Not once did Aaron hit a home run in any of those games, which added insult to injury because i could probably count on about three fingers the number of times i saw the Braves WIN in that era...

Aaron also played in the Deep South at a time when the majority of white folks were totally hostile to him. i remember watching a game one saturday afternoon when i was about seven years old with my grandfather. because he, too, was a big baseball fan, i asked if he would someday take me to see the Braves play. knowing that Aaron was my hero at the time, he nixed that idea in no time flat:

"I'm not taking anybody to see some damn nigger over in 'niggertown'"

he didn't really have a problem with Willie Mays or Willie McCovey, but to actually have one of them so close to home was apparently more than he could deal with...

so, given THAT personal anecdote, i can only imagine what Aaron actually went through. Bonds might whine about how nobody respects him and vilifies him because of the steroid problem, but that's punk-ass shit compared to what Aaron went through his entire career.

and, let's face it...how "special" is the home run these days? in Aaron's day, you could win "home run titles" with 35 home runs some years. these days, that's a good All-Star break total. people like Brady Anderson can hit 50 home runs in a season? Bonds hits 73 in one season?? ridiculous.