Each baseball season eventually takes on its own character, and this is the year of goodbyes. The era of the strike, new ballparks, and steroids is ending; its stars have grown old. Barry Bonds will break the career record for home runs, Roger Clemens will become the first player in 45 years to win 350 games, Craig Biggio will place his 3,000th hit, Tom Glavine will win his 300th game, and Sammy Sosa will hit his 600th home run. Some of them will play on next year, but it isn’t the same game they dominated for so long. It belongs to younger people now.

Lost somewhere in all of this is Frank Thomas, playing these days for an undistinguished Toronto team, just five home runs away from becoming the 21st man to hit 500 home runs in the majors. He’s 39, and not close to what he was. (Who would be at that age and with that NFL body?) These days, he struggles to hit his weight, and looks like he gave the last of what he had in his body to Oakland last year, when he hit like he was 30 again and helped drive the A’s into the playoffs. If you come across his name in the paper, it’s as likely as not to be attached to some speculation about his Hall of Fame chances; he may be coming up on 500 home runs, but that doesn’t mean nearly as much as it once did. Memories must be growing shorter these days, because Thomas is as deserving of election to Cooperstown as just about anyone who’s ever played.

Baseball is a bit different, these days, from the game into which Thomas broke in 1990. There were only two divisions in each league then; Dwight Gooden was 25, with a career record of 119–46; only one player in all of baseball hit more than 40 home runs. (Ten did so last year.) It’s hard then, to remember just what a monstrous player Thomas was, just how good a hitter he was from the time he took his first at-bat.

To put the matter in perspective, compare him with Albert Pujols: Through his first six full seasons and the first 59 games of this season, Pujols’s career batting line is .330 BA/.416 OBA/.622 SLG. His OPS+, a park- and league-adjusted measure of hitting in which the average is 100, is 169, ninth best in baseball history. At the same point in his career, Thomas’s line was .327/.452/.599, and his OPS+ was 182, third best in history. Thomas wasn’t just as good a hitter as Pujols has been — he was a fair bit better.

Literally no one had ever seen such a hitter. The last right-handed batter as good as Thomas was Rogers Hornsby, whose prime came before the Great Depression. Thomas was also an unbelievably large man. In the early 1990s, steroids were just beginning to have an impact on the game, and there were some very large players, but Thomas was something else entirely, 6-foot-5-inches, 260 pounds of muscle, with complete mastery of the strike zone. He wasn’t just a great player; he seemed like the prototype for a completely new breed.

As things went, Thomas didn’t quite live up to the beginning of his career. That massive size worked against him; he lost his ability to play the field, and with a football player’s build, he lost his health and athleticism at the same age football players do — much earlier than most great baseball players do. After turning 30, he was a star in several seasons, and he finished in the top four in MVP voting twice, but he also lost essentially three full seasons to injury, and saw his reputation fade as other players began to put up far gaudier raw numbers.

This early fade, though, didn’t leave him a could-have-been Hall of Famer; it simply meant that he didn’t end up being as good a hitter as Lou Gehrig. If Albert Pujols goes on to hit 313 more home runs in his career, and bat .284/.400/.534, will he be a Hall of Famer? Of course — and if he does so, he’ll end his career having been a lesser hitter than Thomas. Wondering whether Frank Thomas is a Hall of Famer is like wondering whether Hank Greenberg or Jimmie Foxx were Hall of Famers. It’s just silly.

One of my favorite baseball memories is of a game that took place on Monday, May 30, 2005, at Sox Park in Chicago. The White Sox entered the game 34–16, on the way to their first world championship since 1917. That day, Thomas played his first game of the year, his first since injuring his ankle the previous July. That year had a bittersweet end for Thomas; the Sox finally won their title, and he finally won his ring, but he didn’t play a game after July 20, and after the season he had a sad and angry break with the Sox, for whom he’d played his whole career. But on the 30th he was a hero; the park was sold out, and when he came to the plate he was given as loud an ovation as you’ll ever hear in your life. In all likelihood, not one White Sox partisan in the park that day would have said anything other than that Frank Thomas was the best right-handed hitter they ever saw — and they all would have been right. He’s limping his way home, as great players sometimes will, but if you happen to be at the park when the Blue Jays are playing, stand up and give him a hand. As much as Clemens or Bonds or Biggio or Glavine or Sosa, and more than some of them, he deserves it.

tmarchman@nysun.com