“After all, what keeps baseball going? It's the records. People are always talking about records, and if you elminate the records, the game loses a lot of its romance. Yet that's what they‘re doing. They are making records easier to erase.”

—Mickey Mantle on the advent of the designated hitter in 1973, with obvious repurcussions for today; from the book, “Hammerin’ Hank, George Almighty and the Say Hey Kid: The Year That Changed Baseball Forever,” by John Rosengren

Rebuttal? Joe Posnanski argues that most baseball records are hardly as sacrosanct, or as pure, as we imagine them to be; that many factors—some as small as a strike zone, some as big as a ballpark—help create even the purer records:

Stuff usually isn’t black or white, up or down, left or right. It’s complicated. Carlton Fisk, of all people, should know that. If it makes people feel better to shout “fraud” in a crowded theater, hey, it’s a free country. But it seems to me there’s already enough noise out there.