E-Mail This Article to a Friend Changing the rules changes the sport BY CHRISTOPHER YOUNG

Nancy Marrapese-Burrell’s hockey column in Sunday’s Boston Globe detailed how Bruins grand poo-bah Harry Sinden is working with league officials to determine what rule changes could be instituted in the NHL game, if and when the differences which led to the cancellation of the 2005-’06 season are resolved.

One of the more radical proposed changes is the elimination of the offsides call, which would open up the passing game and ideally make the contests more freewheeling, high-scoring, and exciting. Old-time hockey, as it were.

Hockey itself is a beautiful game, but it was suffering in many ways long before the labor dispute shelved the past season. Clutching and grabbing, outsized goaltender equipment that made the netminders look like mini Michelin men, and too few goals scored all combined to relegate pro hockey in recent years to — at best — fourth place among the big four pro sports.

Whether the proposed rule tweaks will enhance the popularity of the NHL remains to be seen. But the bigger question seems to be this: can one drastically change the rules of a sport and then expect the statistics produced before and after the implementation to remain relevant and valid?

Let’s talk about hockey, then. One could surmise that scoring was down in recent years in part because of the ridiculous size of the goalie’s pads; if they are reduced, and then the actual size of the net is also increased, doesn’t that give modern-day players an advantage that prior generations never had? If Wayne Gretzky could score 894 goals during his career in the ’80s and ’90s, how many would he have had if the goal mouth were 13 percent larger (as proposed)? And would Martin Brodeur have notched 75 career shutouts if he wore smaller pads? Changing the parameters of the game of hockey would significantly alter both the way existing records are perceived and how today’s players’ accomplishments would be measured.

Few other sports have proposed changes as marked as those the NHL is contemplating. Still, other sports have undergone adjustments that have affected performance and statistical output.

Poor Babe Ruth led the league in homers for the 1918 Red Sox with a whopping 11 dingers in what many perceive to be the "dead ball" era. As guys like Barry Bonds approach the Bambino’s career record of 714 dingers, can one realistically state that the two sluggers’ careers were comparable? (Let’s leave steroids out of the discussion for now.) The Babe didn’t even whack over 30 homers until his seventh season (54, in 1920, his first in pinstripes), and he improved that year by a nifty 25 from his previous season. How’d he do it? Most likely, it was a re-designed baseball, but how many home runs would Ruth have collected over his illustrious career if not for those mush balls that were hurled his way early on?

One of baseball’s most sweeping changes was the institution of the designated-hitter rule in 1973. How that rule change (in the American League only) has affected scoring records as well as pitching statistics in the AL cannot be charted, but there’s no question that it has had a drastic effect. And when it is time to look back on and rate a pitcher’s career (say, at Hall of Fame time), is it fair to compare AL and NL pitchers equally, since one set never batted and had no patsies to face at the bottom of the batting order? What of potential Hall of Famer Edgar Martinez, who spent the bulk of his last years in Seattle solely as a DH? Would he be Cooperstown-bound without the DH slot?

And what about steroids, anyway? The ridiculous home-run totals posted by some of today’s sluggers may or may not have been inflated by the use of performance-enhancing drugs. But should admitted users Jason Giambi and Gary Sheffield have their HR totals downgraded when it comes time to judge them for posterity?

The NBA has seen its players get bigger over the past few decades, and because dunks had become so routine and effortless, there have been recent discussions about raising the level of the basket from its current height of 10 feet. Can you imagine how scoring records would be forever tainted if this modification were to be made now? What about the rule change instituted in 1954, when the 24-second clock was added? The shot clock completely changed the NBA game and obviously increased scoring averages forevermore. But what about the guys who played prior to the inception of the shot clock? Those hoopsters were often stuck playing in stall-tactic contests where the victor didn’t even reach 50 points!

Change is a fact of life, whether in sports or any other realm of human endeavor. Still, when one values level playing fields in a statistical context, it’s difficult to get an accurate grasp of whose accomplishments were legit and whose were pumped up (or down) if the rules keep changing.

"Sporting Eye" runs Mondays and Fridays at BostonPhoenix.com. Christopher Young can be reached at cyoung[a]phx.com