The baseball season marathon started last week, and all eyes are on Barry Bonds as he chases Babe Ruth and Hank Aaron up the home-run ladder. Bonds started the season with 708 career home runs, which means he needs only six to tie Ruth, and a conceivable 47 to tie Aaron's 32-year-old record.
But 47 home runs isn't all that much to ask from a guy who managed to hit 73 of them five years ago. Right now the question isn't so much, "Can Barry Bonds do it?" It's much more, "How do we react when he does?"
There will always be an asterisk to accompany Bonds' future baseball feats. Last month, a book excerpted in Sports Illustrated offered some disturbing proof of Bonds' steroid experimentation.
According to "Game of Shadows," which was heavily sourced with Grand Jury documents, Bonds and his trainer Greg Anderson had his steroid cycles down to a science.
The laundry list is long. It started in 1998 with Winistrol injections, the same steroid that lost Ben Johnson his gold medal in 1984. Later, he started using human growth hormone (HGH), the "cream" and the "clear," and, to rebalance his testosterone levels after each three-week cycle, Clomid, which is normally used to help infertile women with hormone imbalance.
Perhaps the most disturbing addition to the story is that Bonds claimed the HGH improved his eyesight so he could better track the baseball. The whole system obviously worked pretty well.
Whether you love or hate Barry Bonds, it would be ignorant to cling to the possibility that all of the allegations are false. For example, instead of suing the publisher for libel, Bonds' lawyers filed suit for illegally obtaining sealed Grand Jury documents.
But whether Bonds was using steroids isn't even the argument anymore. While it may be illegal to build muscle by using medication originally prescribed to an AIDS patient -- as Bonds' trainer allegedly obtained for him -- before 2002, baseball didn't do a single thing to stop it.
Not every player was using steroids, but we will never know each and every one who did. I doubt Bud Selig's independently run investigation into the matter is going to accomplish much. And what do they do to the players they find to have taken steroids? Assuming, however naively, that Bonds and all the others are no longer using steroids, it becomes a question of what to do with the tainted statistics. After all, it's a bit ridiculous to penalize someone for doing something in the past when it wasn't against the rules.
Whether or not steroids should be legal, or if Bonds' HGH and Clomid cycles are ethically any worse than cortisone shots is a philosophical argument I'll save for another day. Bonds was cheating by any definition of the word, but the bottom line on all of his extralegal activities is that if Major League Baseball wants to punish him, they had a responsibility to set up some sort of deterrent, and there was none.
It's shameful that Bonds would resort to an intense steroid rotation just so he could hit more home runs than Mark McGwire, but for all we know McGwire did the same thing.
Do we forget Bonds' and McGwire's home runs and pretend that Maris' 61 still tops the list? You can attach an asterisk to that one too, since 1961 was an expansion year. And Babe Ruth hit all of his home runs before pitchers threw sliders or Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier.
But at least the numbers those guys put up were achieved with organic talent, not through the use of a topical testosterone patch.
And therein lies the real problem. Bonds' single-season home run record, and the career record he could very possibly attain this season, are bogus numbers that he achieved through unnatural means.
The Barry Bonds that signed with the Giants in 1993 -- amazing player though he was -- was not capable of hitting 73 home runs in one year. The Barry Bonds that had spent three years injecting steroids in 2001 was. It's a shame, because he could have been a Hall of Fame player anyway.
Unfortunately, Major League Baseball is going to come out of this looking the worst, because Bonds hit 708 home runs with the help of some chemicals whose use was not against their policy. What Bonds did was reprehensible, but nearly impossible to punish.
When the investigation ends and Bud Selig is satisfied that Bonds and others did in fact use performance-enhancing steroids, he's going to have a hard time doing anything about it, and the statistics and records will probably have to stand. In the meantime, Barry Bonds will still be unstable, and still hit home runs.
