Chicago ? Let’s see a show of hands from the people who believe Emmitt Smith is the greatest NFL running back of all time. Thank you. That’s what I thought.

Now let’s see a show of hands from the people who believe Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is the NBA’s greatest all-time scorer. What about Karl Malone? Would you put him right behind Abdul-Jabbar? I didn’t think so.

Sometimes numbers mean everything, and sometimes they don’t. If you were to conduct a poll, most people probably would say Jim Brown, Walter Payton and Barry Sanders are the greatest running backs in NFL history. Smith might get some votes, but he would not be at the top, even though he is the league’s all-time leading rusher with 18,355 yards.

Likewise in basketball, Abdul-Jabbar is the NBA’s career scoring leader with 38,387 points, followed by Malone with 36,928 and a fellow named Michael Jordan with 32,292. But if you asked people who was the greatest scorer, Jordan or Wilt Chamberlain probably would battle it out for the title.

Which brings us to baseball and the ongoing debate about whether it will mean anything when Barry Bonds passes Babe Ruth for second place on the all-time home run list. The steroid controversy aside, it will mean everything because Ruth, quite simply, is the best home run hitter in history.

Period.

This is going to get the Hank Aaron backers in a tizzy because they see their man at the top of the home-run list, with 755, followed by Ruth with 714 and Bonds with 708. That, they argue, is the bottom line.

But, again, back to the numbers and what they mean. Aaron is the leading home run hitter, but he is not the best home run hitter, nor can he ever reach Ruth’s iconic stature. If Ruth didn’t invent the home run, he at least molded it into something with preposterous proportions. He died almost 60 years ago, but kids still know who he was. These are kids who couldn’t tell you where their parents went to college.

Ruth did so much more with so fewer at-bats than Aaron that this shouldn’t even be a debate. (Aaron 12,364 at-bats, Ruth 8,398.)

As Bonds creeps up the list, we should be celebrating two men who were brilliant in different ways while a man who is accused of cheating to the top tries to step on their legacies.

Aaron was a great player, a model of consistency and a man who had to go through an incredible amount of abuse to accomplish what he did. More than a few people did not want to see a black man break Ruth’s home run record, and Aaron had to contend with death threats on his way to making history. He faced adversity that Ruth never did. So if you want to put qualifications on it, call Aaron the Best Home Run Hitter Under the Most Stress.

But there is one thing that can’t be overlooked when it comes to Ruth: In several seasons, the man hit more home runs than many teams did. That’s impossible to get past. It doesn’t matter who his competition was or who didn’t get to play against him or where the fences were. In 1920 Ruth hit 54 homers, and the only team that hit more was Philadelphia, with 64.

What most of us can agree on is that in the current atmosphere of doubt and suspicion, Bonds isn’t in the same league as either of the two people ahead of him on the home run list. He can’t be, not with the accusations of cheating hanging over him.

He’s no Ruth, who was bigger than life. The truth is, neither was Aaron. There’s no shame in that.