Baseball’s homer mark shouldn’t be disputed*

Recent steroids rumors and confessions haven’t stained only baseball. It’s also stained the asterisk, the keyboard’s most misunderstood symbol.

At the office, the asterisk is our friend, disguising our passwords as we log onto desktops. At home, we hit it on our cordless telephones to redial a number, saving precious time.

But in professional sports, particularly baseball, the asterisk needs a lawyer. In short, it has come to symbolize everything wrong with the national pastime, from injected steroids to inflated statistics.

Despite baseball’s refusal to change recent records, it’s not going away.

As injured San Francisco slugger Barry Bonds approaches the home run record and as former bruiser Mark McGwire ducks questions about his past, asterisks will appear in newsprint more than Sunday underwear ads.

They will be addressed on radio and on television, appearing in ballparks across the land.

Already, “Add the asterisk” bumper stickers and “Asterisk Anti-Fan Club” T-shirts are popping up on the Internet.

And there’s James McCarthy, a 32-year-old Scottsdale, Ariz., resident who last year got ahead of the asterisk rush by making 450 T-shirts with “73” and an asterisk printed on the back, referring to the record number of home runs Bonds swatted in 2001.

“I knew a true baseball fan like me would find it funny, and I felt like it was a perfect match for spring training,” said McCarthy, who has sold more than 400 T-shirts. “I’ve considered following the Giants during the regular season, going city to city. I think it could be that lucrative.”

The asterisk wasn’t always such a moneymaker. It originated in feudal times, satisfying printers of family trees who needed a symbol to indicate date of birth. The original shape was six-armed, each arm like a teardrop shooting from the center.

Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia, lists 12 uses for the asterisk, most stemming from computer science, but the most common is the simple footnote, which reminds the public that, yes, something else is going on here, something you should know.

“The asterisk recognizes that all facts have contexts, that most knowledge is relative and that it, as a punctuation mark, will not settle for the failure to recognize this ambiguity,” said Robert Thompson, popular culture expert at Syracuse University.

In 1961, the asterisk attached itself like a flea to Roger Maris as he chased, and ultimately broke, Babe Ruth’s single-season home run record, since snapped in the steroids era by alleged users McGwire and Bonds.

According to reports, then-baseball commissioner Ford Frick placed an asterisk next to Maris’ record since he played a longer season than Ruth.

Truth is, the asterisk never existed. “It’s a myth,” said Gabriel Schechter, research associate at the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum.

Frick simply said there should be a distinction between the two records, one for a 154-game season, another for a 162-game season. Sportswriter Dick Young responded jokingly, “Maybe you should put an asterisk on the new record. Everybody does that when there’s a difference of opinion.”