Baseball's milestones are more like, what, yardstones, footstones, inchpebbles? Maybe grapestones seeing as they come in bunches.

There is Barry Bonds, of course, way out front in this matter, if the less said from here on the better.

Coincidentally, we have Alex Rodriguez, the youngest to 500 home runs, so suddenly in comparison, just a peach of a fellow worth rooting for, dismissing whatever it is that Jose Canseco is trying to do to him.

And Tom Glavine, such a model of dignity and endurance, lasting long enough to step from the shadow of Greg Maddux, holding his own ticket in the grand gang of 300-game winners.

We ought to be celebrating all of this more gladly than we are. There was a moment of possible harmonic convergence when all of these could have met on a single day, and still we would have shrugged.

Trevor Hoffman was the first to 500 saves, Sammy Sosa hit his 600th home run, Craig Biggio got his 3,000th hit and the applause was polite and local.

Frank Thomas' 500th homer passed without as loud notice as A-Rod's, and bearing down on 600 is Ken Griffey, Jr. while Jim Thome and Manny Ramirez may be at 500 already for all the dust being kicked up by mere wonder.

How momentous can 500 homers be when the list is getting larger than Bonds' head? And how rousing or sanitary a number is 3,000 hits when the next likely to get there is Bonds?

Save a medical miracle, and we know how suspicious those things are, for Randy Johnson another 300 victories might as well be another planet.

If no future pitcher may get to 300 wins, not soon but ever, it does not seem to enhance Glavine as the mound's own Eugene Cernan, leaving the last footprints on the moon, but gets rather a shrug that pitching has changed and that's that.

Two of the true gentlemen and gentle men of baseball, Cal Ripken Jr. and Tony Gwynn, took their honors in the Hall of Fame as much as the last of their kind as the best of their kind.

Shudders come when the list of who comes next does not include any one to feel good about until Biggio five years on, or that time after Roger Clemens finally gives it up.

The only good news about this is that finally today's voters will look back and find Goose Gossage as great as ever and what seemed like Jim Rice's heretofore inadequate numbers as honest as Rice was Bondsian surly.

Here's the sad realization. This should be one of the grandest summers in baseball history, and yet it is getting buried in addition and suspicion.

Can this all be disillusionment with baseball in particular and sports in general? Attendance is up, methods of attention are more diverse than ever.

If ESPN with all its digits and surnames can make competitive sports out of poker and overeating, authentic achievement should have louder echoes.

Maybe it is just too much, not just too much of great achievement all at once, but too much of everything, the bad, the good, the corruption of the whole steaming pile.

Baseball was America's album, stored with memories and kept with affection. Clearly it is not any more, so that new pictures and new souvenirs are not collected with the eagerness and love they were.

Another sadness. Football is coming, and basketball and hockey will follow. These are games. These are not metaphors. These are not the critical cohesion of generations.

Baseball was never limited by the calendar, by one season's fashion or the appeal of temporary personalities. It all had to fit between the covers of then and when.

So what has happened this summer, when those pages should have had their own indexes, is we put them aside, or meant to look more closely later, intended to get to them eventually.

Many of the institutions that existed more firmly when baseball began - the church, the family, marriage - have been discarded or battered, changed and reconsidered.

And so now baseball, too, is something it was not, and the achievements that meant much once mean less. The players are more remote and we are more detached.

It is not our fault and it is not their fault. It is nobody's fault. It is just what is.

Which is more than we can say for baseball's milestones. They aren't what they are at all.

lincicomeb@RockyMountainNews.com

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