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The year is 1987. Michael Jack Schmidt, one of the all-time greats and arguably the greatest Philadelphia Phillies, is entering his late 30s. But hes still got a little gas in the tank. Just enough to get him to a major milestone: 500 home runs.

Hed hit 30 or more in 12 of his previous 13 years in the league. Now, in his 16th year in the league, he was about to join the immortals. At the time, only 14 men existed in the 500 club, one-name stars like Mantle, Mays, McCovey and Robinson. Now Schmidty was about to join them.

That same year, a young slugger from the University of Southern California was playing his first full season in the Majors up in Oakland. Mark McGwire would hit 49 home runs that rookie season playing for the As, in his first year eclipsing Schmidts best home run season of his career (48 in 1980).

It seemed over the next decade that season was the one where the torch was passed from the last great hitter of one era to the first great hitter of a new era. What we didnt realize at the time was that the torch was actually being extinguished only to be re-kindled to eventually cast a shadow on an entire generation with its artificial light.

Although steroids and performance enhancers may not have been rampant in the league during Schmidts last great home run season of 1987, there is no doubt that the year the Phillies third baseman entered the Hall of Fame, the game was changing.

In 1995, as Schmidt entered Cooperstown, baseball was attempting to recover from the embarrassing lockout of 1994. Fans had lost interest. Baseball was on life support. It needed a shot in the arm. And it got one. And one in the butt, too.

By 1996, people like Brady Anderson were hitting 50 home runs. In the 10 years since McGwire first put on an Oakland Athletics jersey, the game had evolved/devolved completely.

The 1999 home run contest at Fenway Park was an absolute freak show of the highest order. People were hitting bombs over the Massachusetts Turnpike. For the record, that is not another name for the Green Monster. Shortstops were hitting moon shots Mike Schmidt could never have dreamed of.

Finally, last decade, the truth began to come out. One congressional report, a handful of tainted needles, several whispering rats and one giant juicehead of a whistle blower later, and its now clear what we all ignored for so long. Baseballs record book had become a fraudulent piece of pseudo history.

Obsessively tracking stats and comparing players from disparate eras was an anachronism.

Numbers no longer mean what they once did, and that is why nobody outside of Yankee Stadium seems to care that Alex Rodriguez is about to join the 600 club.

There are only seven players in that historic club of bombers. Unfortunately, it seems more than half of them will be there fraudulently. Only Mays, Aaron and Ruth remain untainted on the home run Olympus. In fact, it would seem that six of the top 14 home run hitters of all time used performance enhancing drugs.

So we are left with how to compare players. Much like there was a dead-ball era, and an era when the pitchers mound was higher and inflated pitchers stats, we now have the steroid era. It makes the numbers completely pointless and it makes the idea of sitting by our radios or TVs (or computers) waiting for A-Rod to make history a complete anachronism, a hollow echo of a time when things like numbers and pride mattered.