Over at The Sporting Blog, Shoals waxes on the “who is the next Jordan” question that we’ve asked and heard endlessly over the past decade. I had regarded it as one of those questions that is asked by Man and answered by Death, but Shoals offers a spot-on dual answer: explicitly that Kobe and LeBron can be combinative components of Jordan’s legacy, and implicitly that there is no next Jordan.

The baseball world wrestles with this question as well. (Well, not specifically “who is the next Jordan,” because the next Jordan is clearly Terry Tiffee.) Jordan is compared to Babe Ruth for obvious reasons, but the “next Ruth” question would require us to bridge impossible contextual impasses. The question of who is the next Willie Mays isn’t often expressed in the same syntax, but over the past few decades, speculation on Mays’ spiritual successor has been almost as present as basketball’s Jordan question.

The next Mays, by definition, is an outfielder with the five tools that talking heads hold dear: an outstanding glove, arm, ability to hit for average, ability to hit for power, and baserunning ability. Bonus points if he’s polite. Historically, the three names most associated with this discussion have been Barry Bonds, Ken Griffey, and Andruw Jones.

Given my spectator’s perspective, I am always hesitant to bring a player’s motivation and work ethic into question, but it is difficult to doubt that Jones’ oscillating nonchalance and impatience rendered his almost limitless potential into an unimpressive batting average and a career that, at age 31, suddenly seems irrelevant. Around 2005 his connection to Mays was almost poetic, as Mays himself goaded him into a new batting stance that propelled him to 51 home runs, but factors other than injury have reverted him back to the drawing board.

As Mays’ godson and torch-bearer for the Giants, Bonds produced play so Mays-like that he would have been exempted from any sort of ill-temperament clause. Of course, Bonds allowed himself to fall into the trappings of turn-of-the-century baseball, and while he himself cannot be called a victim, his career and his comparison to Mays can.

As a personality, Griffey evokes the polite, nondescript demeanor of Mays, much as Kobe does Jordan’s. Unfairly enough, the public has cracked too many jokes toward Griffey’s glass skeleton and balsa-wood hamstrings for it to christen him the “next Mays,” and while I believe that Griffey is the next Mays if there is one, this will unfortunately never be the consensus.

Of these three, one suffers perhaps from a lack of motivation, one from selfishness, and one from factors that are perhaps beyond his control. These do not read as career issues so much as the elements of a parable. The sum-of-parts solution that works with the “next Jordan” question cannot apply. Jones, Bonds and Griffey aren’t the legacy of Willie Mays. They’re the legacy of 1990s baseball. As it turns out, just as contextual differences make it impossible to draw Ruth comparisons, the modern baseball climate makes it almost impossibly difficult to draw comparisons to a player who hung up his hat 35 years ago.

Basketball, like baseball, evolves quickly. Perhaps basketball is running out of time to answer the Jordan question, and the Kobe-LeBron answer will be the final one.