At the time this article is being written, Barry Bonds, the San Francisco Giants left fielder, is one dinger shy of tying the revered Aaron. By the time you read this article, there is a reasonable chance Bonds will have equaled or maybe even eclipsed Hammerin' Hank's mark. Either way, regrettably, it is irrelevant.
Bonds' passing of Aaron is inevitable, just as it is inevitable that charges of undeserved success, achieved through performance-enhancing substances, will forever hound him.
This is so because baseball is a game of statistics, a game defined, more than any other, by the hallowed records it keeps. Believe it or not, Roger Maris is now in seventh place on the single-season home run list. Maris's record, which had been impervious to assault for 37 years, has now been broken six times in less than 10 years, each time by one of the cabal of either Mark McGuire, Sammy Sosa or Bonds.
Frankly, the entire imbroglio has left me waist deep in sour grapes, for a few reasons. In my estimation, Barry Bonds was the best baseball player of the 1990s, prior to the controversy swirling around his alleged steroid use.
His exclusion from the 1999 MLB All-Century Team was an abomination in every sense of the word. He was already the premier defensive left fielder of all time, a title that can never be stripped from him. His eye at the plate was as razor sharp then as it is now. His bat took the same lightning quick, time-defying, beautiful path to the ball that it still does today. He was a member of the 40-40 club, the highly select few who have stolen 40 bases and hit 40 home runs in the same season -- paragons of both speed and power. In 2000, he was already a lock for first ballot enshrinement in Cooperstown.
Then he started juicing, perhaps in response to the anomalous numbers recorded earlier by Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa, or perhaps in response to the All-Century snub.
The 14-time All-Star began to crack home runs at an almost unfathomable rate beginning in 2000 at 36, an age when most players' production declines sharply as retirement looms. Over the span of five seasons during his late 30's, Bonds hit 258 home runs. He averaged a home run every 7.3 at bats during those years, perhaps -- steroids notwithstanding -- the most impressive statistic in the history of sports. Add in the abnormal physical transformations his body has undergone and the BALCO scandal, and the evidence isn't just strong, it's virtually fail-proof.
So, in light of all the facts, how should Bonds' career be viewed? We will never know how history will ultimately judge him, and historians of baseball will pay little heed to what contemporaries said about him. His career may be judged very differently thirty years from now, if it turns out that doping was as prevalent in sports at the turn of the 20th century as some have alleged.
All of that aside, it is my opinion that he should still be considered one of the greatest players ever to play the game and a Hall of Famer. His accomplishments since 2000 have been artificial, but only in part.
Steroids are not a magic potion or a sure-fire prescription for dominance. As odd at it may seem, Bonds' success while using them is still genuinely jaw-dropping. I can say with confidence -- despite how insipid this comparison may be -- that no other player in the modern era of baseball would have been able to even come close to achieving the level of hitting dominance he did, even if they were on steroids.
He's just that good, plain and simple, and always has been. His career prior to steroids was exceptional, and if he hadn't used them, it is my firm belief that he would not have faded into obscurity, but rather finished his career (probably a year or two earlier) with more than 600 home runs and a sure-fire ticket into the Hall of Fame.
