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Baseball fans, and especially baseball fans above a certain age, inevitably look back upon earlier eras as a "golden age" when the players, the competition and the statistics were all "purer," more "meaningful" and "real." Baseball is the ultimate nostalgia sport in our culture, the trigger for so many of us to remember a simpler time and place, when there was nothing more satisfying than listening to the game on a summer evening, nothing more thrilling than a town-rec bus trip to an actual major league stadium, and nobody more heroic, more larger than life, than your own local team's slugger. No player, no matter how great, can ever hold the same mythic grandeur for a 40 year old man that his counterpart three decades ago held for that same man when he was a boy of 8 or 9. I have no doubt that when the immortal Ted Williams was a young rookie, there were certain grumbling old timers in the Fenway stands, telling anyone who would listen: "Well, the kid can hit a little, but he'll never be any Tris Speaker." Behind this crabby, impulse is fear: A fear that the once mighty aura of a great hero will be lost forever, forgotten in the pressing rush of daily box-scores and nightly high-light reels.

Well at the risk of sounding like just another curmudgeonly, middle-aged baseball fan, I will say it: Baseball was a better game, decades ago, when I was a bright-eyed young little leaguer, when the players were not chiseled, steroid-enhanced hulks with freakishly enlarged heads, when only a handful of players hit 30 homeruns or more in a single season, when just the mention of Boston Red Sox left fielder Jim Ed Rice made pitchers throughout the American League wince in terror. And as Rice approaches his last years of eligibility for induction into the Baseball Hall of Fame, I do fear that his once mighty aura will be lost forever; that it has in fact already been lost, washed away by a generation of inflated homerun numbers, and by all the players during this steroid era who have far surpassed Rice's career totals, but who wouldn't have been good enough to carry his jock had they played during the same years.
From 1975 though 1986, Jim Rice dominated the American League. He was the premiere offensive force in the junior circuit, and it wasn't even close. Rod Carrew and George Brett may have been better pure hitters and Dave Winfield a better all-around player, but nobody could put on the one-man wrecking show that Rice did. During that 12 year period, Rice led all AL players

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