When Henry Chadwick started charting baseball games and baseball players, he did so, it seems, largely as a way of creating equity. No one could judge players without really knowing what they did. As baseball's "moral compass," Chadwick looked to stats "to encourage a value system he held desperately dear." Schwartz writes:

Chadwick insisted that only through statistics could the truly special player be recognized. "Many a dashing general player, who carries off a great deal of eclat in prominent matches has all the 'gilt taken off the gingerbread,' as the saying is, by these matter-of-fact figures....And we are perfectly surprised to find that the modest but efficient worker, who has played earnestly and steadily through the season, apparently unnoticed, has come in, at the close of the race, the real victor."

Chadwick's stats were designed to reward these humble, steady players, to find a real and accurate way of valuing each player and what he gives to the game, to reward virtue and skill. It hasn't always been easy; The Numbers Game covers any number of controversies in the history of baseball and its statistics, from a much disputed 1910 batting average title to the chase for the single-season home run record in 1961. But there's a controversy missing. Schwartz is lucky he wrote the book when he did, in twenty years a history of baseball and stats cannot help but cover the question of statistics and steroids.

Lets say, hypothetically, that there is a hitter now who is threatening to break every home run record in the book. And let us say that this hitter used to be quite scrawny. And let us say that, while the hitter is preternaturally gifted on his own and has a very sweet swing, he also owes his homers to an extremely large amount of muscle mass, and let us say that that hitter has been found to be using steroids.

How do we treat this player's numbers? It seems clear what baseball's moral compass would think. What do we do with single season home run records by players who are widely known to have used steroids? How can we evaluate greatness when greatness has sometimes been, well, injected in the ass? Is it fair to compare the numbers of someone who does something historic, aided by drugs, to someone who has not?

How do you think that book, twenty years down the line, will treat the issue? Where is the story of stats in baseball going in relation to steroids? What will the histories say?

For an excellent discussion of the recent history of steroids and baseball, ESPN: The Magazine has a article. Read it when you have a lot of time.