The recent developments in the long festering steroids in baseball story have once again brought out every hack pundit and blowhard sports talk show host. As with previous steroids revelations, the outrage has taken many forms. The most annoying of which is a suggestion that I hear more and more frequently -- wipe out the records and statistics compiled by those players found guilty of using steroids. Not only do I think that that idea is absolutely idiotic, but I feel that anyone who proposes it really has no understanding of what baseball statistics are, and what they mean to the sport.

Statistics are an unbiased record of what happened on the field of play. As any stat geek well tell you, statistics can be influenced by a number of factors (park effects, game conditions, field conditions, etc.), but outside of a judgment call made by an umpire, they can not be influenced by personal or public opinion. A homerun is a homerun. A strikeout is a strikeout. The statistics tell you what happened in a given game, a given season, or a given career. The role of statistics is provide a record of what happened -- fair or foul. They don't interpret the events, they merely chronicle them.

Wiping out some statistics because the player who compiled them had cheated is inherently contrary to the role statistics and records are supposed to play in the game. Those homeruns happened. It is unfortunate if cheating was involved, but wiping their existence from the books is not going to clean up the problem. If anything, it will make things much more messy.

Let's assume for a second that we decide to punish cheaters by wiping out their juiced up statistics. It’s a seemingly simple task, but it can quickly be taken to ridiculous extremes. What happens if a cheater hit a walk-off homer to win a game for his team? If the homerun no longer exists, does the win? Is that win stricken from the books as easily as the homerun that earned it? What about the pitchers who gave up those homeruns? Are their stats updated to subtract the homeruns (and other offensive output) they gave up to cheating players? You could on and on.

Wiping out the statistics of offending players is simply not the answer. Neither is adding an asterisk to the totals of cheating players. Do we have asterisks next to players who corked their bats or who doctored the ball? Do we put asterisks next to statistics of players who compiled stats against players who threw games (ala the Black Sox)? Do we put asterisks next to players set records before the color line was broke because they did not compile their statistics against the racial discrimination limited the quality of competition? The problem with asterisks is that once you start, where do you stop?

Proponents of these ideas will point to sports like track & field which have a policy of wiping out records set by cheaters. This is fine in a sport of individual achievement, but it becomes more complicated when implemented in a team sport like baseball. The ultimate goal of baseball is to win games. Individual achievements are supposedly secondary. Sure, things like homerun totals and individual awards garner their fair share of attention, but they are not the ultimate point of the sport. The point is to win the World Series. In the track and field sports, the whole point is to be the fastest, jump the farthest and so on.

I am not saying that steroid abuse is not a serious offense. I am just saying that messing with the statistical record is not a solution. Statistics measure what happened. The good, the bad, and the ugly. History will take care of the rest. Deleting statistics and asterisks are not necessary because history will remember. And history has a tendency of supplying its own (albeit unwritten) asterisks.